This week there was a security release for all supported versions of SQL Server. Each version has 32-bit and 64-bit patches, and each version has GDR (General Distribution Release) and QFE (Quick-Fix Engineering) patches. GDR should be applied if you are at the base (RTM or SP) build for your version, while QFE should be applied if you have ...

Last week, Microsoft released a series of patches for all supported versions of SQL Server (from SQL Server 2005 SP3 all the way to SQL Server 2008 R2). The reason for the patch against SQL Server installations is largely a client-side issue with the XML viewer application, and for SQL Server specifically, the exploit is limited to potential ...

It's patch Tuesday! [UPDATE June 19 : Please see my follow-up post about this security update.]  Today Microsoft released a security bulletin covering several issues that could potentially affect SQL Server; these exploits include remote code execution, denial of service, information disclosure and elevation of privilege. You should test ...

Have you ever heard of these types of requests?  True story! I have had each of these and many more: A customer needed to grant a business user the rights to issue a KILL command – without giving them sysadmin or CONTROL SERVER.  A customer wanted to grant a user the rights to update a job – just one job – without any other ...

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 ...

Ola's Index Maintenance scripts On August 3rd, Ola Hallengren (blog) released a substantial update to his Backup, Integrity Check and Index Optimization scripts - allowing you to more finely tune the object selection process.  Over this past weekend he also updated the error handling to get around some blocking issues.  For information ...

Do you know where SQL Server is installed - everywhere it is installed?  Do you really know where SQL Server is installed?  Are you looking for a tool that will help you discover any rogue instances so you can better manage these instances?  The Beta 2 for the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 5.0 is now open. Join ...

Yesterday, a conversation on twitter reminded me that I haven't been keeping up with posting cumulative updates.  I missed these updates for SQL Server 2008 on March 15:Cumulative Update #7 for SQL Server 2008 SP1 (10.00.2766)Cumulative Update #10 for SQL Server 2008 RTM (10.00.1835) And yesterday Glenn Berry (blog | twitter) was the first I ...

With SQL Server 2008, we can easily useDECLARE @bin VARBINARY(MAX)SET     @bin = 0x5BAA61E4C9B93F3F0682250B6CF8331B7EE68FD8SELECT  CONVERT(VARCHAR(MAX), @bin, 2)But how can we do this in SQL Server 2005?You can't use a simple CAST or CONVERT, because you get the ASCII representation of the binary values.So, here is how you ...

It used to be very difficult to obtain hotfixes for SQL Server (sometimes even to learn about their existence), and they were often unsupported.  They have made extremely great strides in this area, and in general, I find the new procedure much more convenient : just go to the KB article, select the fix(es) you want, and you get an almost ...