Hi all,

I heard on the grapevine that Microsoft will be releasing SQL Server 2008 R2 within a year. Though I initially thought this was a patch for the just released 2008 version, I realised that it’s actually a completely different version that you would have to pay for. (Am I correct, if you had SQL Server 2008, would you have to pay again if you wanted to upgrade to 2008 R2?)

If you’re already running SQL Server 2008, would you say it’s still worth the upgrade? Or does it depend on the size of your company and current setup. For what I’ve initially read, I do get the impression that this version would be more useful for the very high end hardware setup where you want to have very good scalability.

With regard to programming, is there any extra enhancements/support in there which you’re aware of that will significantly help .NET Products/Web Development?

Initially found a couple of links on it, but I was wondering if anyone had anymore info to share on subject as I couldn’t find nothing on SO about it?

Thanks.

New SQL Server R2

Microsoft Link on it.

Microsoft SQL 2008 R2

EDIT: More information based on the Express Edition

One very interesting thing about SQL Server 2008 R2 concerns the Express edition.

Previous express versions of SQL Server Express had a database size limit of 4GB. With SQL Server Express 2008 R2, this has now been increased to 10GB !!

This now makes the FREE express edition a much more viable option for small & medium sized applications that are relatively light on database requirements. Bear in mind, that this limit is per database, so if you coded your application cleverly enough to use a separate database for historical/archived data, you could squeeze even more out of it!

For more information, see here: http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlexpress/archive/2010/04/21/database-size-limit-increased-to-10gb-in-sql-server-2008-r2-express.aspx