SQL Server 2005 SP1 RTM

The RTM of SQL 2K5 SP1 is now available.

SQL 2K5 has been stable for me, but the first SP is still an important milestone.

One of the key "new" features in this is that Data Mirroring is now baked in. No special flags to turn it on and the SQL Management Studio can monitor it now too.

Downloading and installing...

Update #1 4/19/2006 @ 7:23AM (PDT):
Install went pretty smooth. The only issue I ran into was that the Setup needs to verify authentation and I had the SQL 2K5 services off (I’m running 2k, 2k5, Express, etc, all on my notebook and even with 2GB of RAM that fills quickly...), which the SP1 setup didn’t like. As soon as I started the services, the Setup was able to continue.

Then because I started all the SQL services, when the setup tried to upgrade some of the components (SQL Browser and Full Text Search) it nagged that some of the files were locked. So I shut those services down and again the setup was happy to retry and continue...

I like this new SP system. I dig how the SP1 setup let me know all the services it was going to upgrade.

What I didn’t like was that even though SQL Express was listed, it couldn’t be selected. The setup told me to get the SQL Express SP1 to upgrade that...

To get SQL Express SP1, you need to get this download. The problem I have with THAT is that it’s not clear if that download will apply SP1 or reinstall the entire thing (and if it does reinstall the entire thing, if that’s a good thing...). I’d much rather have a SQL Express SP1 setup that is JUST the SP1 patch and not the entire engine.

Well okay... I do like to have a rolled up SQL Express setup, so one install gets you both the engine and SP1... So I guess I want both. SQL Express SP1 and SQL Express Engine with SP1 included packages.

Anyway, I installed the SQL Express SP1 from the above download to upgrade my system and it installed fine...

Now we’ll just have see how things shake out in the coming days...

(via B# .NET Blog - SQL Server 2005 SP1)

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