SQL Server Management Studio 18.0 Release Candidate 1 is now available

As we get closer to the General Availability of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 18, we have decided to have a quick release of the Release Candidate (RC) build.

You can download SSMS 18.0 RC1 today and for more details on what’s included, please see the Release Notes.

This SQL Server Management Studio 18 RC1 build has some important updates as seen below:

SSMS improvements:

  • Enabling XMLA endpoint connectivity to Power BI datasets: XMLA endpoints provide access to the Analysis Services engine in the Power BI Service. This allows tools such as SSMS and SQL Profiler to connect to Power BI datasets for monitoring, management, and debugging etc. For more details, please review XMLA endpoint connectivity in the Power BI blog.

SQL Server Management Objects (SMO)

  • Added cascade delete support to “Edge Constraints” in both SMO and SSMS.
  • Added support for data classification “read-write” permissions.

Audit Files

  • Updated the list of known audit actions to include FEATURE RESTRICTION ADD/CHANGE GROUP/DROP

In addition, we also have several bug fixes in the following areas:

SSMS:

  • Fixed an issue which was preventing MFA authentication when user ids belonged to multiple tenants.
  • Fixed an issue where the Perf Dashboard Report was reporting PAGELATCH and PAGEIOLATCH waits that could not found in sub-reports.
  • Fixed an issue which resulted in an “Index out of range” exception when clicking on the grid.
  • Fixed an issue where the grid result background color was being ignored. For more details, you can review Azure feedback.

Managed Instance support

  • Improved the display of Managed Instances server specific properties (hardware generation, service tier, storage used, and reserved).

Azure SQL Database

  • Fixed an issue where Service Level Objectives (SLO) were hard-coded, making it harder for SSMS to support newer SQL Azure SLOs. Now users can sign in to Azure and allow SSMS to retrieve all the applicable SLO data (Edition and Max Size).

For a full list of changes, please see the Release Notes.

As usual, if you have a previous version of SSMS 18.0 preview, you will need to uninstall it first. SSMS 18.0 RC1 can be installed side-by-side with SSMS 17.x for testing purposes. As a reminder, the use of pre-GA software in production environments is not supported.

We’d love to hear from you! Please let us know if you have any questions, comments or feature suggestions.