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Announcing the Release of SSMS 21 Preview 3

erinstellato's avatar
erinstellato
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Jan 22, 2025

As we roll into 2025, the SQL Tools team continues to roll out previews of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), and we’re happy to announce the release of Preview 3 today! If you have SSMS 21 Preview installed, you should get a notification of the new preview, or you can select Help > Check for updates within SSMS.  The Visual Studio Installer will launch and check for an update, and you’ll see the update for Preview 3:

From here, you can choose to Update or Close. If you update, note that open instances of SSMS 21 will close.

Preview 3 has a smaller set of updates and fixes due to the holidays, but if you review the release notes, you’ll see that this release updates to Visual Studio 17.13 Preview 3, includes numerous fixes and has improvements in the areas of Query Store display, IntelliSense, and also includes the return of quick find (CTRL + F, or Edit > Find and Replace > Quick Find).

Looking forward, we are working on the next preview release, and want to share a bit about upgrade capabilities which the team is working on for a future release of SSMS.  There are two links we encourage you to review: a blog post that discusses what’s coming with this functionality, as well as a feedback item where you can provide suggestions to help shape the experience.  Please take time to read the post and then add comments on the feedback item – this is the time to share what you want to see.

Enjoy the preview, and please continue to report any issues and feedback on the site. Thanks!

Updated Feb 03, 2025
Version 3.0
  • VladDBA's avatar
    VladDBA
    Brass Contributor

    I'm a really big fan of the update experience in SSMS 21!
    I can't imagine going back to the old and cumbersome "manually download and install new updates" way of updating SSMS.