I’m not prophetic, I promise. However, some good news on the service pack front with regards to SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2. There have been rumblings about a last service pack for these versions of SQL Server for a while, but nothing official had been said. However, an official announcement was made yesterday afternoon:

“We are planning to ship one last Service Pack for both SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2. Because of the maturity of SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2, these Service Pack(s) will be an exception in terms of timing and will ship after mainstream support of these releases ends on July 8th 2014.”

The good news is that we will be seeing one final service pack for both SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2. If you’re not familiar with the support dates, you can see them at the Microsoft Product Lifecycle site which includes a search by product. For instance, you can see the support dates for all the versions of SQL Server from SQL Server 2000 on.