We partake in a number of forums. One is the UK business forum. It's quite an active forum.

There was a question on how to measure visitors to a site. One member of the forum suggested a paid for service. We were curious about this recommendation, why recommend a paid for service when there are perfectly good free ones? So we took a look. Well there was nothing there as far as we could see that was not freely available in the various Google and Yahoo tools.

Providing paid for services which are freely available elsewhere is not illegal. Possibly in the same manner, there are quite a few official looking sites that make a business out of charging (premium) for free or low cost government information (Birth certificate sites come to mind). So we posted a comment with links to the free tools.

Then it occurred to us that it would be worthwhile to show the sort of free reports you can get.

• So we wrote this article.

It has certainly been a while and the clamour for a roll up of those hot fixes and cumulative updates otherwise known as a service pack has been loud and long. Just like buses not one but three at once.

Please note: these do not apply to SQL 2008 R2!

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 2
https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=8fbfc1de-d25e-4790-88b5-7dda1f1d4e17&displaylang=en

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 SP2 Express Edition Service Pack 2
https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=40acf55f-0715-4bb0-9735-d02fc2c8a7af&displaylang=en

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 2 Feature Pack
https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=1b2bd555-cb5b-47b9-88c7-3f89f3b43779&displaylang=en