Introduction

Keeping your SQL Server up-to-date on Microsoft patches and CU is critical to keep your system secured, performant, and stable. If you don’t want to be on the bleeding edge of technology, you would want to stay in control of what and when is getting updated.

This is possible if you have DEV and PROD environments, and you can sacrifice DEV stability to prevent problems in PROD. You download and patch CU on DEV, let it stay there for a month or two, and then decide if performance or problems in DEV can proceed via patch to your PROD. The following blog post will cover how to do it without using Windows Update or WSUS. Effectively, we will be using PowerShell and DBAtools as an alternative to WSUS for SQL Server.

Problem

If you can’t use Windows Update or WSUS, you have to come up with your own custom solution. You can visit the Microsoft website or even subscribe to https://sqlserverbuilds.blogspot.com, or you can have your own solution to not only know about the new, but also to download it as well.

Solution

The following solution adds a daily job that runs PowerShell code using DBAtools to download the latest available CU (if none is available) and sends an email notification.

Take the following PS code from GitHub and save it here C:\PowerShell\sql-server-2022-download-latest-cu.ps1

https://github.com/steverezhener/DBA/blob/master/PowerShell/sql-server-2022-download-latest-cu.ps1

Here is a T-SQL code to create a daily job that would call PowerShell/DBAtools code.

https://github.com/steverezhener/DBA/blob/master/Jobs/_Maintenance_700_Download_Latest_CU.sql

Here is what the final product would look like