Just a short post to make people aware that Master Data Services (MDS), the forthcoming Master Data Management solution in SQL Server 2008 R2, is available for x64 architectures only. Sergei Ivanov from the MDS explains the reasons for this at Where is MDS?:
Understand the motivations, folks. Instead of dispersing resources on testing and support of several processor architectures, we chose x64 as a matter of focus. This is the platform in the data center and for the last several months I've also been running 64-bit Windows Server 2008 R2 on my laptop (Dell Precision M6400).
MDS will also run on 64-bit edition of Windows 7, but having the server OS gives me the ability to run SharePoint 2010 in addition to SQL engine and MDS.
I can understand the justification but its not great news for those that want to poke and prod at the software and learn how to use it (e.g. me)!
@Jamiet