Tag Archive: 2008

The first cumulative update for SQL 2008 is available. Thanks to Aaron who caught the scoop on this one.

There’s a whole bunch of assorted fixes, mostly (it appears) for reporting services, a couple of T-SQL fixes (including one for the merge statement which sometimes won’t enforce foreign keys), a few analysis services fixes and a couple for the tools (mostly intellisense).

Overall, there doesn’t appear to be anything too major in the fix list.

The one really interesting thing about this fix is that it can be run before SQL is installed. If it is, updates setup files will be placed on the machine so that when SQL is installed, the fixed setup files will be run and not the ones on the DVD/download. That’s a really nice feature.

Bob Ward posted a whole blog post on how that works and how to go about it: How to fix your SQL Server 2008 Setup before you run setup…

In a nutshell, it doesn’t work.

There are a number of places in one of the upgrade scripts where the ‘sa’ login name is hardcoded into the script. If, as is possible on SQL 2005, the sa account has been renamed, the upgrade fails and leaves the SQL installation in a state where it cannot be used.

For all the gory details – Connect item 364566

There’s a slightly dodgy workaround listed on the connect site, but the best thing is to make sure that sa is renamed back to sa before attempting a SQL 2008 upgrade.

Update: There’s another workaround for this, other than creating a fake sa account. The PSS Engineers are working on a blog post and KB article. I’ll link to them once the articles are available.

Update: Bob Ward posted a long blog post on this, including a way to fix the broken SQL 2008 service without creating fake ‘sa’ accounts. There is more to come still on this one.

I spent a little more time playing with SQL 2008 this week, though not as much time as I would have liked. I took a look at filtered indexes and some enhancements and changes around the display of the execution plans in Management Studio.

Filtered indexes

These are an interesting feature. There are many uses for these in larger systems and on larger tables. Normally an index is built over an entire table. With a filtered index, one or more predicates is specified when the index is created and the index only contains data that satisfies the predicates. The columns involved in the predicate do not have to be part of the index key, or the index include columns.

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I started playing with the RC0 of SQL 2008 yesterday. So far, I like it. There are some things that don’t quite work the way I would like (intellisense) but overall it looks good. I’m going to talk briefly about some of the features that I quite liked.

First, enhancements and changes to the client tools. I’ll talk about some of the new engine features sometime next week.

Multi-server queries

I’ve spoken about this before, and it’s still a feature I really like. The icing on the cake here… the servers involved in the query don’t have to be SQL 2008. They don’t even have to be the same version. It works for SQL 2008, 2005, 2000 and even SQL 7 boxes.

This offers a really quick way for someone responsible for multiple servers of different versions to check settings, change passwords (like sa), create standard database or tables, etc

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