Yes, the day has finally arrived, and a couple of weeks ahead of schedule.  Typically when Microsoft promises a release in Qx or Hx, the software comes on the last or second last day of that quarter or half.  This year, we get an early Christmas present: SQL Server 2005 SP4.   Downloads To download SP4, go to this ...

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 ...

UPDATE - 2009-08-07 9:39 PM EDT - the SQL Server Release Services team has published a blog post that reflects largely what I've said below. However, many questions are still unanswered. For example, they say that the fix for SP2 is not available yet, but they don't *really* say that the fix is available now for SP3. I think that it is, now ...