SQL Server 2005 SP2 Cumulative Update 4 is available

The latest SQL Server 2005 SP2 Cumulative Update (CU4) is now available.  You can get it by calling into customer support or by making an online request.

 

There are two fixes in the feature areas I own that are included in this update:

(Bug ID 50001816) When you export a SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services report to a .pdf file, blank pages are added.

Our pagination logic would sometimes incorrectly push items inside a table to the next page which, under the right circumstances, would cause a blank page to appear.

Note that this bug would only cause blank pages to appear intermittently in PDF.  If you are seeing consistent blank pages, first check to make sure that: body width + page left margin + page right margin < page width.

 

(Bug ID 50001498) Text in a text box with vertical text in a RTL layout faces the wrong direction.

Right-to-left (including bidi) text will not display with the correct word order when the writing-mode property of a textbox is set to tb-rl.  This affects the image renderer (which includes printing) in addition to the win and webforms controls.  The sister issue is bug ID 50001488 - FIX: A SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services report that uses the Right-to-Left (RTL) layout displays incorrectly in Internet Explorer 7.

Note that the fix included in CU4 does not contain updates to the controls themselves so if you are using the controls in local mode and hitting this issue, you will need to wait for the next update from our developer division.

This was an interesting bug that came about as a result of a customer working around a limitation in our product.  In our 2005 release, we do not support the direction property on chart axis titles.  The work-around is to use textboxes placed outside the chart that have direction set.  This bug (and its sister) were discovered when we tried to implement the work-around.