SQL Server Management Studio 18.2 is now generally available

We are excited to announce the release of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 18.2. For this update, while we added some features, our focus was dedicated to fundamentals such as stability, reliability, performance, etc.

You can download SQL Server Management Studio 18.2 today.

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

Intellisense/editor: Added support for data classification

Query execution: Added a completion time in the messages to track when a given query completed its execution.

ShowPlan: Added new attribute in query plan when the inline scalar UDF feature is enabled.

Key bug fixes in this release include:

SQL Server Management Studio setup

Fixed or greatly mitigated an issue where SQL Server Management Studio setup was incorrectly blocking the installation of SQL Server Management Studio reporting mismatching languages. This could have been an issue in some abnormal situations like an aborted setup or an incorrect uninstall of a previous version of SQL Server Management Studio. You can review the feedback on this issue to learn more.

Always On

Fixed an issue where SQL Server Management Studio was throwing an error when trying to delete an availability group that has a single quote in its name.

Fixed an issue where SQL Server Management Studio was presenting the wrong failover wizard when replicas are configured as synchronous, when using read scale AGs (cluster type=NONE). Now SQL Server Management Studio will present the wizard for the Force_Failover_Allow_Data_Loss option, which is the only one allowed for the cluster type NONE availability.

Fixed an issue where the wizard was restricting the number of allowed synchronization replaces to 3, even if SQL Server 2019 supports up to 5 (Enterprise/Developer/Evaluation Editions).

Registered servers

Fixed issues that would crash SQL Server Management Studio when issuing a query against multiple servers.

Object explorer

Fixed an issue where some menu items like SQL Server import and the export wizard were missing or disabled when connected to SQL express. See UserVoice for more details.

Fixed an issue that was causing SQL Server Management Studio to crash when an object is dragged from object explorer to the editor. You can review the feedback on this issue to learn more.

Fixed an issue where the renaming databases were causing incorrect database names to show up in object explorer. Review UserVoice to learn more.

SQL agent

Fixed an issue that was causing the focus to be reset in the first row instead of the active row when adding, inserting, editing or removing job steps. You can review UserVoice for more details.

In addition, we have also fixed several issues in areas such as SQL Server Management Objects, import flat file wizard, reports, XEvent profiler, etc.

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

As always, we are always listening and would love to hear from you with any questions, comments or feature suggestions.