Microsoft has atlast released its SP2, it has been awaited for so long and it went through a long testing cycle. The CTP was relased some where during mid of October. Lets see what is there in SP2, Now a days the trend as become such that they started releasing enhancements in service packs rather fixes. As you all know SP1 got mirroring similarly SP2 has tons of new features. I just give some of the features that I love it in SP2.
1. Maintenance Plan - The best thing in this and I love it. Now the plans look like our old 2000 ones, we can have multiple schedulers and bye bye to the shit of creating each plan to each job. The only glitch here is in the wizard we have only one maintenance clean up task, so we need to edit it to add the clean up task of the transaction logs :((.
2. There is no need to install business intelligent studio to edit/create the maintenance task hurrahhhhhhh!!!
3. The next best think I love is the reports oh man they are wow... now you can open them in their own window and the best thing is you can add custom reports in side your management studio. Come on guys its time to rock and role and build custom reports :).
4. Mann this feature you all will love it oohh earlier if you are generating scripts, you need to run the boring wizard twice if at all you need to create a script to create object and then drop object. Guess what now it has been changed you can generate scripts for both at the same time. Itsnt good guys you rock.
5. The another thing i have noticed is earlier when you run the sp_helpfile sp on a sql 2000 database, the result will come along with tons of spaces, I noticed it till sp1 but recently after installing sp2 i noticed that the spaces have goneeeeeeee. I surely give a wowooo to SP2 team for this. Its saves me from the pain of removing the unwanted spaces.
Word of Caution : Once SP2 is applied there is no come back path. You need to remove the whole instance and then do a fresh installation to remove the SP2, which is the biggest nah from me. While SQL 2005 was released the MS assured that there it will be easy to remove the service packs but not this time :((. I wouldnt dare to install it in my production. Just install the tools guys and have fun with them and wait for the screams of ohhh this broke this to settle down and then we can install it in our production.
You can read abt the features of SP2 here . you can download the SP2 here . The guys who developed/manage SQL Server blog here just in case if you guys need to give a howl at them :).
