Mr Viral
Microsoft SQL Server 2019 quietly slipped out of mainstream support last week, accompanied by fellow retiree SQL Server Big Data Clusters.
The move of Microsoft’s 2019 version of its database into Redmond’s equivalent of a software care home means only SQL Server 2022 remains in mainstream support, which is due to end on January 11, 2028. SQL Server 2025 is still in preview and threatens to “bring AI to customers’ data.”
SQL Server 2019 Big Data Clusters also retired last week – three years after the initial announcment on February 25, 2022. At the time, Microsoft said the decision was due to customer feedback, adding that “Customers have indicated that analytics in the cloud best aligns to employee skillsets, deployment simplicity and manageability, and cloud flexibility and scalability.”
The Windows maker will provide extended support for SQL Server 2019 until January 8, 2030, over a decade after the initial debut of the product. However, extended support means that Microsoft won’t be fixing or adding anything that isn’t related to security. The Reg could argue that this is how many administrators like it, but sooner or later they will find themselves battling a particularly annoying software bug.
Microsoft dropped the concept of Service Packs with SQL Server 2017, opting instead for Cumulative Updates (CUs), which the company aims to release once a month for the first year after release, following once every two months for the remainder of mainstream support. Once the CUs stop, the company will only ship on-demand fixes and security updates.
The most recent CU for SQL Server 2019 was CU32, released the day before mainstream support ended on February 27.
While the end of mainstream support for SQL Server 2019 might have been drowned out by the furor surrounding the imminent demise of the company’s messaging platform, Skype, it will not have escaped the attention of administrators charged with keeping an enterprise’s fleet of database services running.
In 2024, SQL Server 2019 accounted for the vast majority of installations, according to IT asset management platform Lansweeper. Lansweeper’s snapshot of over 1.1 million SQL Server installations found more than 44 percent running SQL Server 2019, comfortably ahead of the second-placed SQL Server 2017, which commanded 13.51 percent of the survey.
The successor to SQL Server 2019, SQL Server 2022 only accounted for 0.34 percent of installations in Lansweeper’s data, slightly behind the 0.45 percent of SQL Server 2008 R2 and the 2.42 percent of SQL Server 2005.
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The challenge facing Microsoft and enterprise administrators is that SQL Server is one of those services that just … works. Particularly after it has had a few years for all the issues and bugs to be ironed out. Even if an organization has an asset management platform and can identify the SQL Servers in its estate, administrators are unlikely to be particularly keen to migrate to an alternative when business processes appear to be working perfectly where they are.
And, right now, they probably don’t need to. Security updates will keep flowing until extended support finally comes to an end in 2030. At this point their org will have already migrated, though if it hasn’t, the lights could go out on the final workload. ®
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