During the opening keynote on Tuesday at the PASS Summit in Seattle, Microsoft’s Bob Muglia showed a demonstration of a pre-release build of SQL Server 2008 R2 Datacenter Edition on Windows Server 2008 R2.

The demo started out with 64 processor cores running at about 90%. Bob pushed a button, and went to 128 processor cores, which changed the processor utilization to about 50% (see the big plunge in CPU utilization in the middle of the graph). Then, he increased the load on the server to take processor utilization back up to 90%. Finally, he went to 192 processor cores, and the CPU utilization went down to about 65-70% (see the dip at the end).

The server (which filled up a 42U rack) was on stage with Bob. My blurry photo shows it identified as an IBM x3950 M2.

Microsoft also announced a new OLTP world record for TPC-E, of 2012 tpsE, and a new record for TPC-H (on Windows) of 102,778 QphH.

This is even more evidence that SQL Server can and is playing in the “big leagues”.