The Incremental Servicing model for SQL Server continues to march on with Cumulative Update # 3 now available for SQL Server 2008. Microsoft has committed to a CU every 2 months and this strategy seems to be paying off. We’re just beginning to wonder when SP1 will appear. Let’s take a look at CU3.
Cumulative Update 3 was released Jan 19th 2009 and corresponds to build 10.00.1787. The RTM release last August was at build 10.00.1600. The download file amounts to 144MB. That’s quite a set of hot fixes that have accumulated. I’ve seen this before with other mature products. Because of the immense complexity of the internal code, each fix made seems to cause other issues. Looking through the list of 28 fixed bugs (sorry, issues), I can see that there were 6 issues fixed for the Database Engine, 6 for the management tools, 4 for SSRS, 5 for replication, 6 for Analysis Services and 1 for SQL Agent. This seems a pretty even split across functionality. The number of hotfixes seems to have gone down versus CU2 (53 bugs) and CU1 (93 bugs) which should be good news. Not much sign of regression here. Of course, it may be because the customer base is slow to adopt SQL Server 2008 in production and therefore reporting fewer bugs.
However, one fix does peak my interest: 961126 FIX: Error message when you run a maintenance plan in SQL Server 2008: “The SQL Server Execute Package Utility requires Integration Services to be installed”. I seem to remember that very fix in SQL Server 2005 SP2 back in early 2007. At that time, Microsoft allowed us to create a maintenance plan and update it without having to formally install SSIS, as we had to do previously with SQL 2005 SP1. Now that’s what I call regression. But if the buck stops there I’ll be very happy.
Watch this space.
Cheers
Brian
