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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Last week, Microsoft released Cumulative Update #8 for SQL Server 2005 SP3.  The build # is 9.00.4285.  You can read the blog post from the Release Services team here:http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlreleaseservices/archive/2010/02/15/cumulative-update-8-for-sql-server-2005-service-pack-3.aspxAnd the Knowledge Base article, #978915, is available ...

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 ...

In our environment, we run the task scheduler as a cluster resource, so that scheduled tasks always run on the active node.  (In ancient history, we would have scheduled tasks that weren't cluster aware - in the event of a failover, we'd have to manually disable task scheduler on the now passive node, and manually enable it on the active ...

Some new updates just posted by SQL Server Release Services: For SQL Server 2005 SP2, build 9.0.3355: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974647 For SQL Server 2005 SP3, build 9.00.4266: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974648 On first glance, it does not appear that the security updates last week were included in the hotfix for SP2.  (See ...

Sleeping at the wheel again, I missed some big updates for SQL Server 2005 this past Monday. Cumulative Update #5 for SP3 brings you up to 9.00.4230 (the previous update was 9.00.4226). http://support.microsoft.com/kb/972511 Cumulative Update #15 for SP2 brings you up to 9.00.3330 (the previous update was 9.00.3328). ...

Microsoft quietly released another cumulative update for SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3 this week.  So quietly, in fact, that it took me 5 days to notice.  As Chad Miller noted in his comment, this is the first build of SQL Server 2005 that supports the ''lock pages in memory'' setting on Standard Edition.  You can read about the ...

It seems this came out on April 20th, but I did not catch it at the time.  Better late than never, I guess.  As Sean Nolan pointed out in a previous post, CU#3 includes many of the fixes that were available in SP2 CU#13 and not in SP3 CU#2.  You can download the hotfix (which puts you to 9.0.4220) ...