I was having a discussion and wondering how Microsoft defined their software update terms. There are many definitions, found here (until the link dies).
What brought this discussion up was trying to determine if Cumulative Updates (CU), like CU 3, contains the fixes that the previous CU, like CU 2, fixed. The reason for this question was because the support page for a particular CU shows fixes for particular Knowledge Base (KB) article numbers but not KB article numbers for the previous CU.
While the page does state the CU contains all fixes for a particular product, in some cases it will also have a section that has a list of all hotfixes included in the particular CU. This is where the question came. Is the list of all hotfixes complete or does it only show a subset of what’s really included?
But reading Microsoft definitions for the terms they use helped clear up the answer to the question and now it’s understood that a CU has all previous CU fixes included.