Why I Love SQL Server 2016’s SP1

Service Pack 1 (SP1) for SQL Server 2016 pleasantly surprised a lot of us by coming out less than 6 months after SQL Server 2016 RTMed. What was even more pleasantly surprising were the several Enterprise-only features that have now been enabled for Standard and even Express editions with this release.

Two of my favorite features that have been enabled for Standard Edition are In-memory OLTP and ColumnStore. Why? In my line of work, there are lots of instances when I propose a business intelligence solution, that I have to envision a BI strategy for the organization that I deal with. This strategy of course, will not be a one time implementation. Business Intelligence is a journey, you would in a lot of cases need to start small, where budget is a primary concern, and you need to show the stakeholders value, and then based on the value you showcase you expand on technology, usage scenarios and more. And in these cases, value should come with costs that are not insane; Insane as in proposing an Enterprise Edition of SQL Server at the inception, just so that you could show value and performance.

And so now you know why I love Service Pack 1 for SQL Server 2016 — It helps me envision strategy with less cost.

 

SQL Server 2008 vs. Windows 7

Installed the RTM of Windows 7 on my home PC a couple of days ago. Then I tried installing SQL Server 2008 on it. Found out that SQL Server 2008 is incompatible with Windows 7. To make it compatible you would need to install SQLServer Service Pack 1 or later.

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On the same note, to make SQL Server 2005 compatible; you would need to install Service Pack 3 or later.

Slipstreaming SQL Server 2008 SP1

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Service pack 1 for SQL Server 2008 was released just a couple of days ago (07-Apr-09), eight months after the RTM. As exciting as it is, I did not want to put up just an ‘SP1 Released’ post, since it may seem a little too ambiguous and also since I had already done it on the ‘Universe‘…

One feature of this service pack is that it allows for administrators to slipstream it into the main product, hence when new SQL Server 2008 installations are required, they could just install it along with SP1 in one go. This obviously saves time and money. Put that together with the fact that many people haven’t gone ahead with SQL Server 2008 yet; you’ll have a lot of happy administrators when their organizations finally decide to go ahead with implementing SQL Server 2008.

I just tried creating my own slipstreamed SQL Server 2008 with SP1 drop (following these steps), coupling in the latest version of Books Online as well. The only issue was that the final size of the entire folder was more than 5GB, which requires me to compress it if I need to burn it onto a DVD. Isn’t it nice, when things just (almost) work…?