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 ...

It is quite difficult recently for me to find some time to write a new post, so I don’t seem to be leading the rankings of the most frequent bloggers. I rarely recently have opportunity to lay my hands on the code too, so natural sources of ‘inspiration’ are less often. Hopefully this will change in 2012 and I will have more opportunities to write ...

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 ...

Hot off the virtual press, the SQL Server Separation of Duties Whitepaper is now available!  SQL Server 2008 R2 provides the full breadth of tools to support restrictive compliance and security requirements. This whitepaper will associate the features and options available in SQL Server 2008 R2 to meet the varying separation of duties ...

This has come up in conversations more than once in the past little while - recently on twitter I made the casual comment that later this year, SQL Server 2008 will be ''two versions old.''  Well, not everyone agrees that that is technically true.  So, I thought I'd put something out there that isn't limited to 140 characters.  ...

A couple of weeks back I received an email from a member of the community who was reading the XEvent a Day blog series and had a couple of interesting questions about Extended Events.  This person had created an Event Session that captured the sqlserver.sql_statement_completed and sqlserver.sql_statement_starting Events and wanted to know how ...

I see this question a lot: ''I have a SQL Server 2008 R2 database.  Can I attach it to a SQL Server 2008 SP2 instance?'' Part of this stems from the confusion over exactly what 2008 R2 is in the first place.  It is not a service pack to SQL Server 2008; it is its own, full-fledged version.  A lot of people don't fully realize this ...

To close out this month’s series on Extended Events we’ll look at the DDL Events for the Event Session DDL operations, and how those can be used to track changes to Event Sessions and determine all of the possible outputs that could exist from an Extended Event Session.  One of my least favorite quirks about Extended Events is that there is ...

While attending PASS Summit this year, I got the opportunity to hang out with Brent Ozar (Blog|Twitter) one afternoon while he did some work for Yanni Robel (Blog|Twitter).  After looking at the wait stats information, Brent pointed out some potential problem points, and based on that information I pulled up my code for my PASS session the ...