Brent Ozar does some sleuthing:
Over the last several years, Microsoft has been putting less and less effort into Cumulative Update documentation. We used to get full-blown knowledge base articles about fixes, but these days, we get a collection of footnotes with deceiving hyperlinks that look like they’re going to lead to more information – but they simply lead back to themselves.
So whenever a new Cumulative Update drops at SQLServerUpdates.com, before I install it, I like to:
- Log my dev server’s list of current sys.all_objects, all_columns, messages, configurations, etc to tables
- Apply the update
- Query the new contents of sys.all_objects, all_columns, etc to see what new ones were added
Click through for a script that does just this. It’s not as good as having detailed patch notes, but it beats having nothing.