Monday, June 15, 2009

Have you applied latest sevice pack to the client tools?

Well, I have seen a huge number of developers who have not heard aboit it at all. Yes,I'm serious.Recently, I had helped out tuning SQL Server performance of the database in pretty big and to be held in respect company with more than 10 developers. One day one of them asked me about the query ,which restuns the data without the error on his machine ,however , throws the error on the server.If I remember well it was conversion error.I checked both queries and indeed on the dev.machine it runs without the error. I know there is no magic here..and as you can imagine the dev.machine has installed NO service pack at all,but Production SQL Server 2000 has latest service pack (SP4).That's all story. The 'little' difference could have made a big error witout testing as each developer has installed server and client tools on their machines.The SQL Server query optimizer is free to move/change expressions with new release of service packs or hotfix thus please make sure that you have latest service pack on your client tools and test the query as well.