Announcing SQL Server 2014 Service Pack 3

Flash back to July 11th, 2016. The world was pouring into theaters to see the remake of Ghostbusters:

But not you. You were hidden away in a data center, hard at work applying Service Pack 2 to your SQL Server 2014 instances.

Let’s be honest: you chose better than they did.

In the two years since, trusty ol’ Service Pack 2 has had 14 Cumulative Updates. Today, it’s time for him to retire and make way for Service Pack 3. Fixes include:

• Less TempDB contention
• Improved memory grant diagnostics using Extended Events
• Trace flags show up in query plans
• Wait stats, CPU time, elapsed time show up in query plans
• Query_hash and query_plan_hash data types now match between XE and DMVs
• Scalar UDF stats show up in query plans
• Row goals show up in…oh, you get the point
• Unified showplan schema for all supported versions
• MAXDOP hint for creating and updating statistics
• Faster restores on disks with 4K sectors

So get over here, and if you get a chance to re-watch the Ghostbusters remake, well…there is no remake. Only Zool.