The engineers here at AIS have a love hate relationship with patch management. When it works, life is wonderful… when it does not work… well…

Which leads us to SharePoint 2010’s Service Pack 1 (available to download at this link). When downloaded and executed against your server, this service pack updates the binaries NOT the database. How will you know? You will notice several errors in your event log similar to this one:

The mount operation for the gatherer application [Guid goes here] has failed because the schema version of the search administration database is less then the minimum backwards compatibility schema version support for this gatherer application. The database might not have been upgraded.

So, what is happening here?
The service pack has updated the SharePoint 2010 binaries (I.E. the software is up-to-date). The service pack, however, does not run the Configuration Wizard. This means the SQL database has not yet had the necessary scripts executed to update the database schema. It seems the update is really a two step process.

So, how do I really know I need to perform additional steps
Ask SharePoint

1. Launch the SharePoint Management Shell
   Start Menu: All Programs –> Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products –> SharePoint 2010 Management Shell
2. Enter the following command
   (get-spserver $env:computername).NeedsUpgrade
3. If the response is True, you server requires additional upgrade steps to be completed

So, how do I fix it?

1. Launch the SharePoint Management Shell
   Start Menu: All Programs –> Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products –> SharePoint 2010 Management Shell
   Important! Remember to run the management shell as an administrator
2. Enter the following command
   psconfig -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait
   NOTE: This command *must* be entered on every server in your SharePoint farm

It is recommended to run IISRESET or (our personal favorite) reboot the server.