SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 3 Customer Technology Preview Available

Microsoft and the SQL Server Sustained Engineering team are pleased to announce the availability of SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 3 CTP. Service Pack 3 for SQL Server 2008 includes product improvements based on requests from the SQL Server community and hotfix solutions provided in SQL Server 2008 SP2 Cumulative Updates 1 to 4. Both the Service Pack and Feature Pack updates are available for download on the Microsoft Download Center.

With this Service pack, Microsoft is introducing approximately 65%* fewer changes to customer configurations compared to previous SQL Server Service Pack releases. This remarkable improvement is a testament to an evolved and disciplined product development process and updated servicing strategy that is focused on ease of deployment and customer environment stability.

The following highlight a few key updates requested by customers in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 SP3:

  • Upgrade: Improved the experience for customers when upgrading SQL Server from previous versions and improving installation performance & robustness.
  • SSIS: In SSIS, logs will now show total number of rows sent in Data Flows.
  • Manageability:
    • Added warning message when creating the maintenance plan if the Shrink Database option is enabled.
    • Fixed the permission issue on shared memory which caused SQLAgent.exe failed to run from command line.
  • Improved the compatibility of WMI with Next Major Release.
  • Full-Text Search: Full-text query was enhanced to support multiple-language stemming.

For complete details please visit the KB article 2546945 accompanying the SQL Server 2008 SP3 CTP release.

To download the SQL Server 2008 SP3 release please select from the links below:

 Thanks to all the customers for their continuous support and feedback.

Abhishek Sinha
Program Manager
SQL Server Sustained Engineering

*Based on Internal Microsoft release data

 

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