SSMS 19.3 Is Available

Introduction

On January 10, 2024, Microsoft released SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 19.3. You can download it here. The release notes are here. This means that SSMS 19.3 Is Available.

I think the primary motivation for this “surprise” release is security related. The fix described below was also in an out-of-band GDR release for SQL Server 2022 CU10. It is also included in SQL Server 2022 CU11.

• Update to Microsoft.Data.SqlClient 3.1.5 to address CVE-2024-0056

If you are using a modern version of SQL Server in any capacity, you are going to want SSMS 19.3. This includes “regular” SQL Server, Azure SQL Managed Instance, Azure SQL Database, Azure Synapse Analytics and Microsoft Fabric.

SSMS 19.3 is fully aware of SQL Server 2022, and it is also officially supported on SQL Server 2014 and newer. It will probably mostly work on older versions of SQL Server, but I have not tested that. You can run SSMS 19.3 side by side with SSMS 18.x, SSMS 17.x and SSMS 16.x, so you can still use those older versions of SSMS to manage any older versions of SQL Server.

If you have a preview version of SSMS 19.0 installed, make sure to uninstall it before you install SSMS 19.2. You should also be aware that by default, the SSMS 19.3 installer will install Azure Data Studio 1.47.1 without asking, whether you like it or not. You can avoid this by installing SSMS from the command line with these settings:

• SSMS-Setup-ENU.exe /Passive DoNotInstallAzureDataStudio=1

I actually don’t have anything against Azure Data Studio, but I think it should stand on it’s own merit rather than getting stealth installed without asking. It is very obvious that Microsoft wants more people to use ADS, but this is not a popular method they are using to increase the installed base.

Why Should I Install SSMS 19.3?

SSMS 19.3 is the best version of SSMS so far, even if you are managing older versions of SQL Server. As I discussed in a previous post, SSMS 19.1 Performance Improvements, cold startup time for SSMS 19.1 and newer is signifcantly faster than SSMS 18.12.1, even on relatively fast hardware.

If you need to startup SSMS on smaller VMs with slower server hardware, many times per day, you will save a lot of time if you have SSMS 19.1 or newer!

Beyond that, there are so many bug fixes and improvements that you have access to by using the latest version of SSMS.

Final Words

Now that SSMS 19.3 is available, it removes another roadblock for deploying SQL Server 2022. This is supposed to be the final release of SSMS 19.x, which will be replaced at some point in the next few months by SSMS 20.

If you have any questions about this post, please ask me here in the comments or on Twitter. I am pretty active on Twitter as GlennAlanBerry. Thanks for reading!