Big news for everyone who has to manage Microsoft SQL Server, whether they’re DBAs, sysadmins, or developers.
Seven years ago, Microsoft announced automatic, downtime-free hot patching of the SQL Server engine in Azure SQL DB. The tail end of that post had a teaser in it:
Well, I guess enough of you emailed in, because 7 years later, starting with Cumulative Update 4, SQL Server finally has that capability! The original technical post covers the internals of how it works, but there are a few changes for the on-premises boxed-product version of SQL Server:
SQL Server’s CEIP service