Randy Holloway at Microsoft : Microsoft Committing to Auto-Updates for SQL Server

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Jerry Dennany said:

Problem - SQL Server patches often have 'breaking' changes (whether intended or not). I'll let everyone else be the first to install these patches, and also the first ones to flesh out the new bugs in the patches.
What would be nice in SQL Server is more of a built in patch management system.

# August 23, 2003 11:13 AM

Randy Holloway said:

Jerry, the system you're describing makes sense to me. I think that the updates need to be presented to you automatically as an administrator and you ought to be "forced" to download them by default. Then, through an administration tool like you're describing, you can elect to allow the changes to take effect, or the patches to be applied. What do you think?

# August 23, 2003 11:22 AM

Jerry Dennany said:

Sounds good, actually - the system that you propose still allows the control that I want, with the ease of use and gauranteed patch deployment that others are likely seeking.

+1.

# August 23, 2003 11:29 AM

Robert McLaws: BoyWonder.NET said:

# August 23, 2003 1:15 PM

Randy Holloway said:

See more comments over at Robert McLaws' post.

http://weblogs.asp.net/rmclaws/posts/25089.aspx

# August 23, 2003 3:58 PM

Frans Bouma said:

Terrible idea. They can better start packing they 'hotfixes' for SQLServer in an installer. It now comes with a cumbersome file and you have to copy/paste files yourself, making sure you backup the right files etc. What's so bad about having a decent installer for an SQLServer hotfix?

Also, doing 'active' patches on a server where no-one is logged on is bad: who knows what the patch will break, or better: is the patcher 100% failproof? The service packs aren't failproof either, so why should this patcher be? Will it backup everything first? And when it does that, will it also backup active transactions?

I know one thing: the first thing I'll kill on my sqlserver is the active patch process.

# August 24, 2003 3:59 AM