This week Microsoft released SQL Server 2019 RTM.
I’ve not had much time to play with it so far. The headline new feature of SQL Server 2019 appears to be support for Big Data clusters which is not something any of my clients have asked about. However I still think they’d benefit from the in-memory tempdb and some new performance tweaks so I’m keen to check these new features out and see for myself.
I did have issues upgrading from SQL Server 2017 on my desktop PC. I had a Developer edition instance that was previously upgraded from SQL Server 2016. The 2019 installer was failing on the Client Connectivity SDK. I ended up removing as much as I could but was unable to clear away the SQL Server 2016 Setup files. To resolve this I did an install of SQL Server 2016 again and uninstalled everything. This then cleared away the troublesome setup files and I was able to install SQL Server 2017 and SQL Server Management Studio 18.4. If anything this reinforces the best practice of not upgrading SQL Server instances but installing as new.
