Wednesday, April 16, 2008

SQL 2005 SP3 on the way

The good news: It looks like Microsoft is finally going to release Service Pack 3 for SQl 2005. The bad news: It won't be until Q4 of 2008, after the release of SQL 2008. Aaron Bertrand on SQLBlogs talks more about it here.

This is something that was a long time coming. Microsoft has something like 7 cumulative hot fixes. Some of the things on that list are things I want to start testing. One patch is for a problem I see on occasion, where our production servers kick out a SQL dump on a non-yielding process. This was addressed in SP2, which we're running, but not fully. I've seen other blogs that referenced a fix in one of the patches.

Monday, April 7, 2008

Taking 70-441 in 3 1/2 weeks

Hopefully I'll have enough time to study, especially since I'm on vacation for the 2 weeks previous to that.

I've read the MS Press training kit for this exam, and I've already passed 70-431 last summer. I know that won't be enough to pass this one, bit at least i've got a starting point for my studying. I also watched 4 webcasts that the Microsoft Partner program had on last year; I'll re-watch those. Too bad they're not downloadable. They'd be perfect for my daily commute.

But I can't complain about those webcasts. I got a voucher to take the exam for free!. The only thing was that it expires on May 1st, hence the quickly approaching date.