As of 27th Oct 2008, the latest service pack for SQL Server 2005 has been made available for Beta testing with the CTP (Community Technology Preview) program. This is good news as most customers are waiting on an upgrade decision for SQL Server 2008 but still want the latest updates for 2005. It’s almost been a year since SP2 so this is well overdue. It’s a great part of the process that Microsoft releases the Service Pack as a CTP. That way, users can report issues straight away that may need to be fixed before official release. The service pack includes all the cumulative updates for SQL Server 2005 and we can rest assured that the updates have been tested together as a unit, especially as the service pack will be exposed to the customer base before release. One interesting piece of SP3 is an updated version of Notification Services 2005 that will also run on SQL Server 2008. Let’s take a look….
SSNS is an application framework that was first released as an add-in to SQL Server 2000, and has not been as widely used as was hoped. For instance, another add-in released at the same time was Reporting Services, which has been, in contrast, hugely popular. Notification Services was released to enable customers to send large numbers of messages to a variety of devices based on data changes and user subscriptions with scalability in mind. However, Microsoft had let us know that it will no longer support Notification Services officially as part of SQL Server 2008. Microsoft’s vision is that any notifications that are needed can be supported by Reporting Services 2008 data-driven subscriptions. So this latest update is Microsoft’s peace offering to the customers that had already bought off on the SSNS feature. Notification Services will live a little longer in its life cycle but clearly Microsoft does not want to commit any more resources to this product.
The only concern I have is that the data-driven subscription feature of Reporting Services is an Enterprise only feature currently. SSNS was a feature also supported by the Standard Edition. So this is one more feature that we have to pay big bucks for in SQL Server 2008.
Later
Brian
Recent posts
