I spent about a year with PSS, off and on, trying to repro / resolve an issue where a SQL Server 2005 cluster had SP1 "sort of" installed.  It took on one node, but somehow rolled back on the second node.  Suddenly you could tell which node you were on simply by selecting @@VERSION (the "bad node" still said 1399).  Due to another bug I spent a lot of time with PSS on, relating to tempdb memory leaks, but that is thankfully fixed now (3161 I think), we were manually failing over every weekend.  Except we had to fail over and then fail back to ensure that the "good node" was active.  When SP2 came out, I thought, finally, we can stop this nonsense and not be so concerned about which node is active.  This problem was still not resolved.  As a part of an unrelated hardware migration, I finally retired that cluster and moved the application to a new cluster... on which both nodes are currently running 3228.  What a nightmare leading up to that though... you never knew when a failover was going to cause bugs to resurface on the node that was still at RTM...

MS still has a long way to go with SQL on MSCS Clusters. The company I work for has a Win 2003 R2 \ SQL 2005 Enterprise x64 Active-Active 2-Node Cluster - once you get it installed it's great, but a *lot* of pain to get there, and once there you have to be *so* careful doing any changes. Just document absolutely all the install steps to make it reproducable, and automate installation tasks as much as possible to avoid weird issues. E.g. if one Node has a Network Connection named "Heartbeat 1", and another Node's Network Connection was mistakenly labled a space after the name "Heartbeat 1 ", you can get all the way through setting up MSCS, installing SQL 2005, but SP2 will continually fail.  Same issue if you are logged into both Nodes at time of SP2 install can happen. I hope SQL 2008 \ Windows 2008 is better!

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Hi Ben,

I am very thankful for this valuable article, how ever I liked the way u did to get the dependencies of the table and then script as per the order, and I would like to do the same with Views of my database, where some of the views are dependent on other views, I tried using

DependencyTree tree = scr.DiscoverDependencies(view, true);

DependencyWalker depwalker = new Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.DependencyWalker();

               DependencyCollection depcoll = depwalker.WalkDependencies(tree);

but it didnot worked for me, Please advice.

Thanks

Manish

manishwc@gmail.com