With the year drawing to a close, I thought it would be the perfect time to recap the major developments in Microsoft Business Intelligence throughout 2012. Unsurprisingly, the launch of SQL Server 2012 proved to be the focal point of this year’s releases, although we had a few extra surprises along the way:

I was editing some pre-existing SQL Server Agent jobs the other day, adding some interconnectivity and changing steps around as I’ve done hundreds of times before.  These job steps are used to execute SSIS packages (SQL Server Integration Services) on the server and have been running for months (years?) without fail.  However, after I made my changes they started failing on the steps I had edited, throwing the bizarre error:

Option "/CALLERINFO" is not valid.  The command line parameters are invalid.

July 12th was a good day for all SQL Server enthusiasts and professionals as Microsoft announced the release of both Service Pack 1 for SQL Server 2008 R2 as well as Community Technology Preview 3 for the next installment in the series, Codename Denali.

SP1 brings with it a number of stability and security fixes as well as some more advanced configuration options to fine-tune performance.  The most interesting update from my point of view is the updated syntax on the FORCESEEK index hint, which now has extra options to further fine tune queries.