Installing SQL Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1

This blog will provide a step by step details of installing SQL Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1. Before installing Service Pack, I would recommend you read one of my earlier blogs Best Practices for applying SQL Server Service Packs.

Once you have downloaded the Service Pack 1, copy the .exe file to a local drive and right click on the file and choose Open from the popup menu to begin the installation. (You can alternately double click the file to begin the installation).

The exe file take a min or two (depending on your system) and extracts to a temporary location, once the extraction is completed, the below screen is displayed and the installer performs few checks and displays the below screen. If there are any failures, ensure that the necessary steps are performed. Click Next to continue installation.

Accept the license terms by selecting the check box. In addition to accepting the license terms, you might chose if you would like Microsoft receive emails about the feature usage on your Instance. Click Next to proceed.

The next step is features selection, where you have to choose the components to which you would like to apply the Service Pack 1. We are going to apply SP1 for 2 instances at the same time. If you have more than 1 SQL 2008 R2 Instances on the machine, you can choose which instance(s) to apply Service Pack. You can select the check boxes beside each of the Instances or if you wish to Install for all Instances / features click Select All button in the bottom left.

You can click on the Instance to see the current details of that Instance / feature. In the picture below, I clicked on the R2_PRODINST and the Edition, Patch Level and other details are displayed..

Click Next after you are done selecting the features to be applied with SP1.

The next step checks for the files / services that are being used currently and lists if there are any files that needs to be stopped in order to avoid a restart. 

Click Next to proceed. Then the below screen is displayed which shows a summary of features that are going to be updated to Service Pack 1. Click Update to start the installation.

Once the Installation is done, the installation progress is displayed showing the list of Instances / features which were updated.Click Next to continue.

Click Close to close the Service Pack Installer. Restart the machine if possible, else the SQL Instance(s) that have been updated with the Service Pack 1 (in case of multiple instances).

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— Bru Medishetty

Things to know when Installing SQL Server 2008 R2 side by side with SQL Server 2008

If you are planning to install SQL Server 2008 R2 as an additional Instance on a machine where SQL Server 2008 exists, then you have to keep in mind some implications. Though nothing fatal might occur in the first place, but there would be some changes depending on what settings / features that are selected while Installing SQL Server 2008 R2. 

When installing the first instance of 2008 R2, you would come across the below warning message. The message indicates that the Shared Components will be upgraded to SQL Server 2008 R2.

What this means to you is, when you are done performing the installation, the shared components of SQL Server 2008 will not be available any more. Some of the shared components include.. SSMS, BIDS, Profiler, Integration Services, SQL Server Browser etc..

To avoid this scenario, the way out is not to choose Shared Components in the Installation step where you select the features list, that way SQL Server 2008 R2 instance will be installed but the shared components will still be of version SQL Server 2008.

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Create Linked Server to connect to a SQL Server Part – II

This blog is Part-II of last week’s blog post Create Linked Server to connect to a SQL Server Part – I. In this blog we shall learn two more ways of creating a Linked Server for a SQL Server destination.

In the first part, we saw how to create a Linked Server using graphical interface from SSMS. In that method, we created linked server by selecting Other data source as Server type. In this method of creating Linked Server, we shall choose SQL Server as Server type and know more details about what is the difference when creating this way.

When creating Linked Server in this way, keep in mind that Linked Server name we are going to enter in the text box should be the same as the target SQL Server. If the target SQL instance is a named instance, you should be entering the full instance name as Servername\Instancename.

Security and Server Options in this method is same as as we saw in the first part of this  blog, so I am avoiding explanation of those steps in this blog. Once you are done, choose OK to create the Linked Server.

Using T-SQL

You can also create a Linked Server using system stored procedure sp_addlinkedserver. Below screen shot shows the script that I used to create a linked server using the system stored procedure sp_addlinkedserver. 

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–Bru Medishetty