Today we are excited to announce the availability of our Customer Technology Preview (CTP) for Service Pack 1 of SQL Server 2008.    This scheduled servicing release addresses feedback received from many of you who have deployed SQL Server 2008 since our release back in August 2008.     

We take every update to SQL Server very seriously and we are especially pleased that in reviewing the changes being made with this service pack that we have reinforced our confidence(and hopefully yours!) in the quality of the initial release of SQL Server 2008.    We know that some of you are accustomed to wait for the first service pack of any new software that enters the marketplace, and hopefully with this update you can get even more insight and confidence in our engineering and quality practices. 

We remain committed to our plans to keep service packs contained, focusing on essential updates only, primarily a Roll-up of Cumulative Update 1 to 3, Quick Fix Engineering (QFE) updates, as well as fixes to issues reported through the SQL Server community. While keeping product changes contained, we have made significant investments to ease deployment and management of Service Packs:

• Slipstream - You are now able to integrate the base installation with service packs (or Hotfixes) and install in a single step.
• Service Pack Uninstall - You are now able to uninstall only the Service Pack (without removing the whole instance)
• Report Builder 2.0 Click Once capability

We encourage you to try out SP1,  and send us your feedback.      Please know that we are actively reading all feedback and appreciate any thoughts that you might have to help us with this product update.    Please go to Connect Feedback Center to provide feedback.    Continue to watch this blog for more updates,  we target the final release based on customer feedback and proof points in the coming weeks.

With the upcoming general availability of SP1, it's a good time for any of you that are still running SQL Server 2005 (or even some of you still using SQL Server 2000!) to take a look at the great enhancements and benefits that 2008 provides.  There are a lot of new capabilities that you may not have had a chance to look at such as Compression, Auditing, Policy Based Management, Resource Governor, Change Data Capture, Transparent Data Encryption and many more Database, Reporting, Warehousing and Analytics improvements that you can read about here.   

Thanks and we look forward to releasing SP1 soon!

Mauricio Monico
Program Manager
SQL Server Sustained Engineering