Aaron Bertrand

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Paul White is an independent SQL Server consultant specializing in performance tuning, execution plans, and the query optimizer.

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In April and May, Microsoft released cumulative updates for SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 (I blogged about them here and here). They are:

Branch Original CU Build # KB Article Date Added
SQL Server 2008 SP3 CU #11 10.00.5840 KB #2834048 2013-05-20
SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 CU #12 10.50.2874 KB #2828727 2013-04-15
SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2 CU #6 10.50.4279 KB #2830140 2013-04-15

 
Sometime after that, looks like the next day, both downloads were pulled, allegedly due to an index corruption issue (if you believe the commentary on the Release Services blog post for CU #6) or due to an issue with w3wp.exe (if you believe the label on the hotfix posted directly to the CU #6 article itself). Or perhaps both. At the very least you may see a regression involving index corruption or massive index size deviation when you rebuild a clustered index online and the plan involves a non-clustered index. I don't have a repro handy.

On June 13th, both articles were updated with new versions of the cumulative updates that no longer exhibit this symptom (sound familiar?). And they were updated again June 17th. So if you download today, you'll actually get:

Branch Updated CU New Build # KB Article Date Updated
SQL Server 2008 SP3 CU #11 10.00.5841 KB #2834048 2013-06-17
SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 CU #12 10.50.2875 KB #2828727 2013-06-17
SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2 CU #6 10.50.4285 KB #2830140 2013-06-17

 
Please check @@VERSION. If it reports 10.00.5840, 10.50.2874 or 10.50.4279, please go re-download and re-apply the relevant cumulative update for your branch. Better yet, if you're on 2008 R2, please see my post where I announce new CUs for the 2008 R2 branches:

Branch CU Build # KB Article Date Added
SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 CU #13 10.50.2876 KB #2855792 2013-06-17
SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2 CU #7 10.50.4286 KB #2844090 2013-06-17

 
In cases like this, I really, really, really wish they would release a new, out-of-band cumulative update (this is a non-issue, now, for R2, but remains an issue for 2008 SP3 customers for another month or so). How many people go back and take another look at the CU article once they have downloaded, installed, and regression tested? Does everyone regression test a full set of online rebuilds, an operation that probably doesn't occur that often? I think many users will simply not see this update and are on the verge of experiencing the symptom – there simply isn't enough visibility when they quietly swap out the versions that the download links yield.

[Cross-posted on sqlblog.org]