SQL Server 2008 delivered a trusted, productive, & intelligent data platform with the fewest vulnerabilities, innovative manageability, & built-in enterprise reporting & analytics. SQL Server 2008 R2 delivers higher mission-critical scale, more efficient IT, & self-service business intelligence.SQL Server 2008 R2 delivers several breakthrough capabilities that will enable your organization to scale database operations with complete confidence, improve IT & developer efficiency, & enable highly scalable & well managed Business Intelligence on a self-service basis for your users. With SQL Server 2008 R2, Microsoft continues to be the value leader, offering rich functionality to support OLTP & BI workloads out of the box at a low cost of ownership relative to competitors. With increasing hardware innovations, SQL Server continues to be the only major database vendor who does not price per core for multi-core processors. Line-of-business applications (LOB) are the critical link between the IT department & the business. The ability to securely & reliably store, centralize, manage & distribute data out to users is key to these LOB applications. SQL Server 2008 provides businesses with a high performance database platform thats reliable, scalable, & easy to manage. SQL Server 2008 R2 builds on the 2008 release & helps IT departments provide even more cost-effective scalability on todays most advanced hardware platforms using familiar SQL Server administration tools. There has never been greater demand for IT to provide more value with existing budgets & resources. To achieve this, they need tools & capabilities that help them maximize efficiency across the application lifecycle with streamlined management, rapid development, & predictable deployment. SQL Server 2008 R2 builds on a long history of enabling DBA & developer productivity with new tools & capabilities to help IT administrators & developers make the best possible use of time & resources.SQL Server 2008 R2 provides new tools for managing large multi-database environments along with enhanced capabilities to help maximize the value of consolidation efforts, & ensure the streamlined development & deployment of data-driven applications. IT departments & users have traditionally been at odds with each other over self-service analytics. IT departments seek to maintain IT governance & control; end-users want to generate & manage their own content & reporting. With managed self-service business intelligence in SQL Server 2008 R2, these two worlds meet, providing significant business advantage. SQL Server 2008 R2 provides both end-users & IT with cutting edge tools to create, analyze & model, share & manage business intelligence data in a secure & streamlined way. Self-service analysis tools allow end-users to quickly create solutions from disparate data sources within a familiar Microsoft Office Excel user interface. By publishing these solutions in Share Point Server, users can easily share them with others. IT gains management & oversight so they can help ensure the reliability, performance, & security of data-driven assets across the enterprise while also gaining better visibility into how people are using their data.