In a previous blog post about Service Pack 4, I said the following: ''...from this point forward all you're likely to see are cumulative updates to the SP3 and SP4 branches and, roughly a year from today, mainstream support will only need to maintain the SP4 branch.  You can read more about this in the following blog post from the CSS ...

Last February / March, I wrote several posts about an issue with MSXML6 on Windows XP which prevented the installation of SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008, and even service packs or cumulative updates in some cases:2009-02-20 : The XP SP3 / MSXML6 SP2 / SQL Server debacle 2009-03-16 : More info / good news : installing SQL Server on XP SP3 with ...

Yesterday, Microsoft released a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 4. You can read about the release on the following blog post from SQL Release Services:http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlreleaseservices/...preview-available.aspxIf you don't want to read the blog post, you can go right to the download pages:SQL Server 2005 ...