Editorials

Service Packs – Things Changing with Your Work with SQL Server?

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Service Packs – Things Changing with Your Work with SQL Server?
Several people wrote in with thoughts on the application of service packs. Seems like things are indeed changing… from the Microsoft perspective, but that vendors and customers are slower making the change to applying service packs more frequently. In the case of vendors, *supporting* service packs more quickly with applications isn’t quite happening yet either. I was a bit surprised about this, actually. I was hoping to hear that everyone was embracing the faster deployment of updates and service packs. I realize "updates" is different than true "service packs," but I was still hoping that vendors had found the magic, uber-responsive bullet.

[Email Your Thoughts Here]

Kathy writes "Thank you for asking this question!!! I was starting to think I was the only one struggling with these issues! We have seen at least one case where the patches were applied when the monthly OS patches were applied.
Not necessarily bad since MS is only including security patches, unlike Oracle that includes other bug fixes and enhancements. Still there needs to be some level of testing. We are still having a very difficult time
getting MS to answer questions about recommendations on applying. When you have a very large number of servers, it is difficult to consider manually applying these patches on a monthly basis!
"

Lee also wrote in with their approach: "In my agency, our policy is to wait until the patch has been out a little while (month) to see if it breaks other people’s stuff. If it doesn’t, we apply it to our development environment to see if it breaks that. Assuming that it doesn’t break things immediately, we watch the server in question for a period of time (couple weeks) to make sure that we don’t see any problems. Only then, do we move things to production. We then apply in off hours and cross our fingers."

Guess we’re still at the "wait until the next dot-release?"

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