How can I report a SQL Server bug to Microsoft?

A. There are several ways, but the >>ONLY<< way you can be sure of an engineer looking at it and providing you with a workaround/fix is to report it to Microsoft's PSS (Product Support Services) team. These are people who support all MS's products, write fixes, take the calls, sort out workarounds etc. They work 24x7x365. You can call them by phone (U.S. is 1-800-936-3500)

For details of your nearest PSS support centre and other info try :-

http://support.microsoft.com/support/supportnet/default.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/support/customer/itpro.htm

To report on the Web :-

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/support/incident.htm
http://support.microsoft.com/support/webresponse.asp

All incidents are chargeable either to your credit card or an existing account. The charge WILL be re-imbursed if the problem turns out to be an Microsoft bug, or a feature that hasn't been publicly documented. The person answering the phone cannot know it's a bug, so they have to take details of your credit card before passing you on to a technician. When the call is closed the technician decides whether to mark the call as "free" in which case you get a refund automatically. (Same for Web incidents)

If you don't want to pay for a call then there are "free" email/web response methods via e-mailing [email protected] or http://support.microsoft.com. However, these methods merely get the "bugs" filed somewhere - they do not currently guarantee that anyone will even look at them, let alone do something about it - you will almost certainly get no feedback so there is no way of knowing what has happened to your bug report.

Can't I report it to a Microsoft newsgroup? Yes, but Microsoft employees do not officially monitor these forums. It is possible that they will notice a bug report, they may even look into it - it's not even unheard of them to contact the person with the problem. However these are all the exception rather than the rule. The newsgroups are there for peer to peer support and are not an official bug reporting channel.

If you can provide a reproduction script on the newsgroups then one of the MVP's (we are NOT Microsoft Employees!) can pass this to PSS for you. It has a much greater chance of being looked at that way, but again, is not a guarantee. If you do post a repro script then there is a good chance that someone will be able to find you a work-around though.

Whatever method you use, in order for Microsoft to resolve a bug they need to re-create it on their systems. The best way to do this is to provide them with a repro script - this needs to show the problem when run on a brand-new install of SQL Server on a new database. Therefore it needs to contain all tables, user defined data types, triggers, views etc. needed to show the problem. If it needs data then try and keep this to a minimum. (See reproscript.txt in the FAQ for more details and an example)