After a lot of arguing and debating in 2008, it appears that Service Pack 3 for SQL Server 2005 is getting close. Last week the beta was released to the public and based on feedback and additional testing, it should get released before the end of the year. For those of you that don't have time to test every CU or can't apply any patches to your SQL Server except Service Packs, this is good news.
In the Database Weekly editorial this week, I encouraged you to test the patch if you have some spare cycles. It's always good to have a wide variety of situations and environments looking at the effects of these large changes to the SQL Server platform. As much as Microsoft tests, they can't test every situation, and indeed, history shows they miss quite a few.
As I wrote the editorial calling for some testing, I felt a little conflicted. After all, is it our responsibility to actually test Microsoft's code? It's not. We pay them money, and the bottom line is Microsoft is responsible for ensuring that the code is tested. Or they fix it. We're not always pleased in the way it happens, with Service Packs re-released inside of a few days sometimes, but I have to give them credit for responding to the situation quickly when it is serious. It's better than trying to add a patch for the service pack or ignoring the situation.
The reality, however, is far different from what we'd like. Ultimately we do bear some responsibility for ensuring that the service packs are well tested. We may not want it, we perhaps shouldn't bear it, but it's the variety of individuals out there, you DBAs that apply it to test systems, that end up finding out many of the bugs which are problematic and force additional work to be done by Microsoft to correct issues in the patches.
So for those of you calling for Service Pack 3, along with me, and as much as I hate to place a burden on you, I think you need to schedule sometime over the next week or two, find some resources, apply the patch, even in a VM copy of your critical systems, and run through some testing. Be sure that your application still works; your jobs, your monitoring, and various other processes still run after this patch is applied. If you have bugs that are documented, make sure they're fixed.
It's not the situation most of us hope for, and I sincerely hope Microsoft doesn't take us for granted as the first line of testers, but it's our diligence that ensures when we do schedule time to apply this to our production systems, it's a non-event. And none of our customers ever notices we did it.
Steve Jones
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