Service Packs and Log Shipping

SQL Server 2000 service packs can be applied to instances that have log shipping with the following caveats, as documented in the Readme file (this was taken from SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 3).

More Info

For more information on SQL Server 2000 service packs and log shipping, see Chapter 13.

If Service Pack 3 Setup detects user databases or filegroups that are not writable, it:

Applies the Service Pack 3 replication updates to all writable user databases.
Writes a list of the nonwritable databases to the Setup log, which is located at %windir%\Sqlsp.log.

Displays the following warning message:

 Setup has detected one or more databases and filegroups which are not writable.

This means that you might need to rerun the SQL Server 2000 service pack once the secondary server s database has been recovered so that it is at the same level as the rest of the server.

Caution

Do not apply any SQL Server 2000 service pack prior to Service Pack 2 on a log shipped server. Service Pack 1 would not apply successfully on a server that had databases that could not be written to.