Patching isn’t fun. It’s time consuming, thankless, and easy to break stuff.
But you can’t skip it. For critical systems, you need to subscribe to patch lists for SQL Server and review issues that are fixed regularly.
Hindsight is everything. I was lucky to be trained by a great team of DBAs back when I first started with SQL Server. But it’s hard to know exactly what you really need to know, particularly as new tools are becoming available.
There are a couple of local security policy rights that are not granted by default in SQL Server setup that I’ve been setting manually for a few years now:
Somehow, I didn’t know about slipstreaming installations of SQL Server until last week. I heard about them at SQLPASS in Allan Hirt’s session on installing SQL Server 2008 on Windows 2008 clusters.
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