SQLAuthority News – Download – SQL Server 2005 Books Online (December 2008)

Download an updated version of Books Online for Microsoft SQL Server 2005. Books Online is the primary documentation for SQL Server 2005. The December 2008 update to Books Online contains new material and fixes to documentation problems reported by customers after SQL Server 2005 was released. Refer to “New and Updated Books Online Topics” for a list of topics that are new or updated in this version. Topics with significant updates have a Change History table at the bottom of the topic that summarizes the changes. Beginning with the December 2008 update, SQL Server 2005 Books Online includes documentation updates for the SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3 (SP3) release. This post covers the SQL Server 2005 Books Online (December 2008) release.

Books Online includes the following types of information:

• Setup and upgrade instructions.
• Information about new features and backward compatibility.
• Conceptual descriptions of the technologies and features in SQL Server 2005.
• Procedural topics describing how to use the various features in SQL Server 2005.
• Tutorials that guide you through common tasks.
• Reference documentation for the graphical tools, command prompt utilities, programming languages, and application programming interfaces (APIs) that are supported by SQL Server 2005.
• Descriptions of the sample databases and applications included with SQL Server 2005.

Download SQL Server 2005 Books Online (December 2008)

How to Read the Books Online (December 2008) Update

The small Change History table at the bottom of updated topics was one of my favorite parts of these releases. It told you exactly what changed in a page, so you did not have to compare two versions line by line. When a topic I relied on had a new entry there, I read it before doing anything else.

This update also mattered because it covered Service Pack 3. If you installed that service pack but kept reading the old help, you could miss a change in behavior or a newly supported option. Keeping the documentation and the build at the same level saves a lot of confusion.

This download is from 2008 and may not be available now. SQL Server 2005 is long out of support. If you still maintain one, treat the old help as a reference only, and make the upgrade plan your first priority.

Published by Pinal Dave on SQLAuthority. More of my work at pinaldave.com.