Happy Presidents' Day!

It's a holiday in the US and hopefully most of you are not working today. For those of you overseas, hopefully it's a quiet day for you as well, with no queries running slow, servers down, or users complaining. Today I'm up on the ski slopes, enjoying a short holiday with my family, so no long editorial today.

I wanted to remind you, however, that a number of patches were released by Microsoft last week. We had quite a few security patches affecting a number of Windows software products, including a few critical patches. You should check the list and be sure that you test and apply these updates if you are potentially vulnerable.

I also wanted to note that SQL Server Release Services announced two service packs coming later this year.

• SP2 for SQL Server 2008
• SP4 for SQL Server 2005

I am confident that SP2 would have been released later this year, but I do not think that SP4 would have been released without a lot of community support. Thanks to everyone for voting and while this is likely the last SP for SQL Server 2005, it will give us a nice rollup of all patches to date.

Note that CUs will continue to be released, but in my mind at least, they are no substitute for Service Packs.

Enjoy your Presidents' Day and I'll be back tomorrow with a new editorial.

Steve Jones