May 13, 2005 at 4:30 pm
I haven't been able to find much on SQL Server 2000 SP4, which is a pity, because I need to evaluate it for deployment on servers running DelTek Costpoint, Kronos, and Great Plains. I know DelTek won't bless it for probably another 6-12 months, because they drag their feet on every new technology. But I was surprised to see that there was very little on SP4 posted by anyone, aside from the tech pundits who essentially regurgitated Microsoft's press release. Maybe the search engine spiders haven't crawled enough to return anything meaningful.
Anyway, I did run through the SP4 installer and found it to be pretty painless. If anyone else has any anecdotes, caveats, or charming witticisms to add, please feel free. Here is my evaluation, snipped from an email I sent to co-workers:
First impressions:
·
The setup looks exactly like the SQL Server 2000 SP3 setup. There is the same screen asking about cross-database ownership chains, as well as the question about sending crash analysis data to Microsoft.·
Since the MDAC libraries are being significantly updated, a reboot is required on some machines (on my W2K Pro machine, I had to reboot). W2K3 and XP machines might not have to reboot.·
The file download is ~60MB and decompresses to ~102MB.·
This update increments the SQL Server build version to 8.00.2039.·
As far as I could tell, no changes made to the user interface. All the improvements are under the hood.·
I’ve tested two sql-connected apps (i.e. an MS Access 2003 "ADP" project with lots of ADO code, connected to a database on my local SQL Server, and an ASP.NET webapp that calls on database tables in another database on the same server) and both of them are working the same.·
This update can’t be rolled back. So if things go south, you should be prepared to do a full server restore.The gist of this is that this SP apparently does not break datacentric applications of sufficient complexity. I am fairly certain SP4 is as safe as SP3 to deploy.
However, I need to find some evidence that it's safe to deploy on production servers running vendor applications. Anyone have an opinion?
My $0.02…
May 16, 2005 at 7:01 am
I agree with everything you said. I installed it on a Win2K test server and it looked and acted just like SP3. I did notice in the readme file and read this elsewhere that starting on the Windows 2003 platform that MDAC upgrades will no longer be done in SQL Server and or SQL Server service packs. This will be done in Windows 2003 and it's service packs. There is one new 'feature' that I thought was interesting in SP4 about detecting and resolving stuck I/O issues.
August 5, 2005 at 12:15 pm
I had SQL Server 2000 SP4 installed on development and QA servers (mixture of Win2k and Win2003 servers) for about six weeks before I upgraded all of our production servers (also mixture of Win2kand Win2003). Over the last two weeks I've come across the following issues which are somehow? related to the upgrade.
A certain job started failing with the following error on a server with dual processor:
Intra-query parallelism caused your server command (process ID #64) to deadlock. Rerun the query without intra-query parallelism by using the query hint option (maxdop 1). [SQLSTATE 42000] (Error 8650). The step failed.
This was resolved by using the suggested hint option. Mind you, this is a job that has been running successfully each night for more than two years!
Next we found that stored procedures using @@IDENTITY value caused locking issues. After series of testing, we found that changing the statement
SELECT @v_cur_id = @@IDENTITY
to SET @v_cur_id = @@IDENTITY fixed the issue.
These are the two issues I've come accross. We do not have AWE enabled so I've not seen that issue. Also, installation was a charm, no problems at all. Please let me know if you've come across the two issues I mentioned about and how you resolved them. Thanks.
Joseph
September 6, 2005 at 9:08 am
We have hit this same problem after applying SQL Server 2000 SP4. However, we are hitting with our replication process, and it cause our replication to stop. We probably had 30 failures over a 5 day period since applying SP4.
Since this is replication, it is not just a simple 'fix our code' issue.
We are moving to new hardware tonight, so possibly the added capacity will get us by the issue, if not, we need a work-around.
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