Hello all! I hope to see some of you next week at PASS. But in advance of that, I wanted to let you know that a whitepaper I co-authored this past summer was just published. It is entitled “Testing and Developing Supportability Roadmaps for Independent Software Vendor Applications”. The title may be a bit misleading, because it’s something EVERYONE can use if you do any kind of development as well as patching of your SQL Server applications, databases, and instances.

In this whitepaper we cover:

  • The different kinds of SQL Server updates and how they differ
  • Other updates that affect SQL Server
  • How to understand versioning in SQL Server
  • GDR Branching – the first time this has been formally covered anywhere!
  • How to perform ongoing testing
  • Developing a supportability roadmap

Like I said, forget the fact for a moment that it references ISVs – this is a paper that we wanted to get out because it really will benefit a lot of you.  

The whitepaper can be found as part of this blog post: http://blogs.technet.com/b/sql_server_isv/archive/2010/10/20/hot-fixes-and-cus-and-service-packs-oh-my.aspx

Enjoy!