Are you ready for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2? Microsoft has followed its "R2" strategy, which was used successfully on Windows Server, and now applied it to SQL Server as a functional release to the existing 2008 version. Many of us are still coming up to speed with the great new features of SQL Server 2008 so we are thankful that this will be an incremental release and will be a free upgrade for existing 2008 licenses. Maybe some of the features in R2 will actually persuade more customers to upgrade to 2008. Microsoft hopes so. This white paper highlights some of the major features included in SQL Server 2008 R2 due to be released in the first half of 2010.