We've been running SQL Server 2014 for almost a year now, but SQL Server 2012 SP3 continues to appear in the Windows Update list (as an optional install). It seemed ridiculous to install a service pack from a previous version, so I've just ignored it.
However, we've recently started encountering an assertion failure (see below for more info), and one thing we're doing to try and resolve it is making sure the server is fully patched. We installed the latest cumulative update for 2014, but it hasn't solved the problem or made that SP3 item disappear from Windows Update. SP3 still wasn't on my radar, but then I found a Microsoft Product Support Services blog post that said to use the Best Practices Security Analyzer to try and troubleshoot assertion failures, and when I did it raised a warning that we hadn't applied that SP3.
So now I am considering applying that install, but I'm worried that I'm going to accidentally downgrade my server - not that we'd go back 2012 entirely, but that some of the cumulative updates might get reverted, or some other bizarre behvaior.
(This is not the exact assertion failure we've been receiving, but it's close. I cannot find a KB article that seems to describe the actual issue we're having - the KB linked in the previous sentence has to do with TOP N
and ours has to do with a procedure using OFFSET X ROWS FETCH NEXT Y ROWS ONLY
. The actual assertion failure is SQL Server Assertion: File: <op_ppqte.cpp>, line=12258
)