I’ll always remember where I was on Tuesday, March 19th, 2019 at 6:55PM.

I was sitting in the Seattle airport, waiting to board the last leg of my flights home to San Diego. I happened to check my phone, and…

It was here.

The update we’d waited for for YEARS had finally landed. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Microsoft fixed the “String or binary data would be truncated” error! It’s true! Be still, your beating hearts!

KB #4468101 tells you that if you enable trace flag 460, SQL Server will finally tell you just what in the sam hell is going to be truncated.

SP2 CU6 also includes a lot of other fixes like:

Users are incorrectly permitted to create incremental stats on nonclustered indexes that aren’t aligned to the base table

Assertion for parallel deletes from filestream tables

Filestream IO can’t be enabled on cluster shared volumes

Assertion for linked server queries that point to themselves during a cross-database transaction (talk about a perfect storm)

MDS database upgrade fails

Filtered nonclustered columnstore index over a clustered columnstore index may not be maintained (that’s an interesting term for corruption)

Stack dump during change tracking cleanup

Data masking doesn’t

Here’s the full list of fixes in SQL 2016 SP2 CU6, and also today, Microsoft dropped 2016 SP1 CU14. But screw that one – that one doesn’t have our sweet, sweet #4468101 fix. Go get you some of that.