SQL Server Management Studio 18.3 is now generally available

September 23, 2019

Product
SQL Server Management

Today we’re announcing the release of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 18.3. For this update, while we added some features, our focus was primarily on fundamentals such as stability, reliability, and performance.

You can download SQL Server Management Studio 18.3 today and review the SQL Server Management Studio release notes for details.

Some of the new features in SQL Server Management Studio include:

Intellisense/Editor: Updated support for features recently added to SQL Server 2019 such as ALTER SERVER CONFIGURATION.

SQL Server Management Objects and scripting

Added support for support scripting of Azure SQL Data Warehouse unique constraint
Added support for ordered clustered columnstore index in Azure SQL Data Warehouse
Data classification:
- - Added support for SQL Server version 10 (SQL Server 2008) and higher
  - Added new sensitivity attribute ‘rank’ for SQL Server version 15 (SQL Server 2019) and higher and Azure SQL Database

Key bug fixes include:

Database Deployment to Azure SQL	Fixed an issue in DacFx that was causing this feature not to work.
General SQL Server Management Studio	Fixed an issue, that was causing SQL Server Management Studio to crash when using the sorting feature in the XEvent viewer. Fixed long outstanding issues where SQL Server Management Studio restore database may hang indefinitely. See UserVoice items for more details: Restore Database – Select Backup Devices Slow to Load SSMS 2016 very slow in the database restore dialogs Restoring database is slow Restore Database from Device HANGS on clicking “…” Fixed an issue where the default language for all logins was shown as Arabic. See UserVoice item for more details: SQL Server Management Studio 18.2 default language display bug. Fixed the hard to see dialog for Query Options when the user right-clicks on the T-SQL editor window by making it resizable. The Completion time message that’s visible in the result grid/file that was introduced in SQL Server Management Studio 18.2 is now configurable under Tools > Options > Query Execution > SQL Server > Advanced > Show completion time. In the connection dialog, we replaced Active Directory – Password and Active Directory – Integrated with Azure Active Directory – Password and Azure Active Directory – Integrated, respectively. Fixed an issue that prevents users from being able to use SQL Server Management Studio to configure auditing on SQL Azure-Managed Instances when located in a time zone with negative coordinated universal time (UTC) offset. Fixed an issue in the XEvent UI where hovering over the grid was causing rows to be selected. See UserVoice item for more details: SQL Server Management Studio Extended Events UI Selects Actions on Hover
Import flat file	Fixed the issue where the import flat file was not importing all of the data by letting the user choose between a simple or rich data type detection. See UserVoice item for more details: SQL Server Management Studio import flat file fails to import all data.
Integration Services	Added a new operation type StartNonCatalogExecution for SQL Server Integration Services operation report.
SQL Server Management Objects/Scripting	Fixed an issue that was causing SQL Server Management Objects to throw errors when fetching properties when SMO.Server.SetDefaultInitFields(true) was being used.
Query Store UI	Fixed an issue where the Y-axis did not scale when the Execution Count Metric was selected in the Tracked Query View.

Please see the SQL Server Management Studio release notes for a comprehensive list of bug fixes.

As always, we’re always listening and would love to hear from you with any questions, comments, or feature suggestions via the SQL Server feedback forum.