14 DAY TRIAL // On May 14th, Redmond-based software giant Microsoft made available for download the Community Technology Preview (CTP) version of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 2 (SP2).
The company notes that this release comes with a variety of fixes inside, and that all of its customers who are already using the SQL Server 2008 R2 should take the new release for a spin.
Service Pack 2 for SQL Server 2008 R2 comes with various improvements based on the requests received from the SQL Server community, while featuring hotfixes that have been included in the SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 Cumulative Updates 1 to 5.
Some of the main changes in the new release include:
Reporting Services Charts Maybe Zoomed & Cropped - Customers using Reporting Services on Windows 7 may sometime find charts are zoomed in and cropped. To work around the issue some customers set ImageConsolidation to false. Batch Containing Alter Table not Cached - In certain situations with batch files containing the alter table command, the entire batch file is not cached.
Collapsing Cells or Rows, If Hidden Render Incorrectly - Some customers who have hidden rows in their Reporting Services reports may have noticed rendering issues when cells or rows are collapsed. When writing a hidden row, the Style attribute is opened to write a height attribute. If the attribute is empty and the width should not be zero.
For a complete list of all the changes that have been included in the new SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2 CTP release, you should head over to this knowledgebase article on Microsoft’s website.
Customers running SQL Server 2008 R2 should download and install the new SP2 CTP to get a taste of the included enhancements and to provide feedback on their experience, so that more issues would be resolved in the future releases.
As part of the new SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2 release, customers will be able to choose between SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2 CTP, SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2 CTP Express and SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2 CTP Feature Pack.
All the necessary download links related to the new Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2 CTP can be found on Softpedia as well, via this link.