The long-awaited release of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 19.0 is finally here!
This is the recommended release for SQL Server 2022, and it includes support for combability level 160. You can review the entire list of new functionality and fixes in the release notes, but we'd like to call out a few highlights here:
- Improved support and additional options for Azure Active Directory Authentication
- Migrated to Microsoft.Data.SqlClient (MDS) from System.Data.SqlClient (SDS)
- Support for Contained Availability Groups
- Support for Ledger
- Improvements to the Link feature for Azure SQL Managed Instance
- Removal of dependency on SQL Server Native Client (SNAC)
- Installation of Azure Data Studio 1.41
In addition, we received a lot of feedback about the dialog box, "Querying transaction count", we introduced back in SSMS 18.11. In 18.12, we added an option to cancel the check if it took more than two seconds, but user comments indicated that was not enough. Therefore, in SSMS 19.0 you have the ability to disable to dialog box completely. Within Tools > Options > Query Execution, simply uncheck the option "Check for open transactions before closing T-SQL query windows".
For those who installed a preview version of SSMS 19 (thank you!), it's recommended to uninstall that version before installing SSMS 19.0. Please note that if you have an earlier release of SSMS (e.g., 18.x), you can install 19.0 side-by-side with that version.
We know many of you have been looking forward to this release, and we appreciate your patience. Please know that we do monitor the feedback you all provide, and items that have steps to recreate (in the case of bugs), real-world examples (in the case of requests), constructive comments, and upvotes are extremely helpful to us. We have a few tasks to finish up, including making a standalone download for Distributed Replay available, but know that we are already planning for the next release. We look forward to hearing from you, whether you just want to be on the latest version of SSMS, or you're upgrading to SQL 2022. And if it's the latter, good luck with your upgrade, and as always, test your backups!