Which SQL Server Service Pack am I running?

With SQL Server Service Pack 3 out and the recent Slammer virus I have noticed that the many people have been posting threads as to find out which SQL Service Pack Level they are running.Hopefully this FAQ will help you to determine that for you.

To determine this you will need to open Query Analyzer and execute the following statement:

select @@version

This will return a result similar to the this:

Microsoft SQL Server 2000 - 8.00.679 (Intel X86) Aug 26 2002 15:09:48
Copyright (c) 1988-2000 Microsoft Corporation Enterprise Edition
on Windows NT 5.0 (Build 2195: Service Pack 2)

Firstly don't get confused by the Service Pack at the end. This refers to the Windows Service Pack not SQL Server. The SQL Service Pack level is determined by the following numbers:

8.00.679

The 8.00 refers to SQL Server 2000, 7.00 would be SQL Server 7 and so forth. The numbers after that will determine which SQL Server Service Pack is running on your server and which cumulative patches have been installed. Admittedly the numbers are quite meaningless, to determine what the numbers stand for you can go to the following link:

http://www.sqlsecurity.com/DesktopDefault.aspx?tabindex=3&tabid=4

This link will take you to table that lists the version returned by @@version and the patch level in understandable terms.Just compare your result with this table.

The website www.sqlsecurity.com is a site dedicated to SQL Server Security and is one the best sites to discover security risks and vulnerabilities in SQL Server. I recommend that you visit the site frequently to stay abreast of what's going on from a security point of view.