The Redmond Company has made available for immediate downloading Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 Service Pack 2. With this update, Microsoft has fixed the major problems contained by the previous release. "In addition, a new feature called Archiving and Purging has been added which can automatically manage both the purging and the archiving of the tracking database," revealed the company.

Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 Service Pack 2 supports Windows 2000 Server; Windows Server 2003; Windows XP, and while BizTalk Server 2004 is a prerequisite for the installation, SP1 is not. Moreover, Microsoft has informed that BizTalk Server 2004 Service Pack 2 is incompatible with BizTalk Server 2002 and BizTalk Server 2000 systems and therefore upgrades from those platforms are not an option.

Here is a list of a few key improvements in Service Pack 2:

- Performance issues with different orchestration scenarios
- EDI transmit fails with certain structures of outgoing messages
- Disassembling large flat file messages in the pipeline stalls other processing
- The rules engine is not honoring rule priorities correctly in high load
- Body tracking doesn't track the original message
- Dynamic send ports causing 10 second delay in subscription
- 100% CPU in orchestration when calling PrepareForActivationComplete
- Messages could still be delivered even though the orchestration instances were zombied
- Connection problems with HTTP Request-response requests
- Request to turn off FTP Throttling
- Memory Leak problem in PipelineContextWrapper/Interop.ResourceTrackerbr