Recently my friend told me that he is hitting a weird error whenever he tries to edit a job using SSMS from his machine.

I walked to his desk to get a feel of what is happening, and he was indeed right! He was hitting the below error when ever he tried to edit a step for a SQL jobs from SSMS.

I decided to grab a cup of coffee,and then slowly started looking around to see if I can isolate the problem.

The first thing I did was to check the version of SSMS which was in use.

Now things started becoming more clear. The SSMS version was 10.50.1600 which is at least 2.5 years old and we have moved far away from the early 2010’s.

Without second thoughts I decided to patch up the SSMS to latest service pack, which is SQL 2008 R2 SP1.

Meanwhile when the patch was running I just did an RDP to the server and launched SSMS to check if the issue was happening there too (Yeah, not that a great thing to do on a production server, however for some rare cases I do this)

The issue was not happening directly from the server and SSMS was running latest version.

We tried to repro the same issue after patching got completed, and viola the issue was fixed !!!

Conclusion

This scenario clearly shows the fact that there are lot many issues which get addressed whenever a new Service Pack is released and its always a good practice to patch your local SSMS too whenever a SP is made available.

Yet another reason to keep up to date on SP levels.

Thanks for reading.