Ever wonder how fast people are adopting new versions of SQL Server, or what’s “normal” out there for SQL Server adoption rates, hardware sizes, or numbers of databases? Let’s find out in the winter 2022 version of our SQL ConstantCare® population report.
Out of 3,679 monitored servers, here’s the version adoption rate:
The big ones:
Companies are leapfrogging right past SQL Server 2017. I’m going to hazard a guess that SQL Server 2017 came out too quickly after 2016, and didn’t offer enough features to justify upgrades from 2016.
Does that offer us any lessons for SQL Server 2022? Is 2022 going to be a 2017-style release that people just leapfrog over? Well, as I write this, it’s late December 2022, and I’m not seeing the widespread early adoption that I saw for 2019 where people had it in development environments ahead of the release, learning how to use it.
Me personally, one of the most awesome features of 2022 is the ability to fail back and forth between SQL Server and Azure SQL DB Managed Instances. However, that feature is still in limited public preview that requires a signup. Combine that with the fact that both 2022 and Managed Instances have really low adoption rates, and … I just don’t think this feature is going to catch on quickly. (As a blogger/speaker/trainer, that’s useful information, too – I only have so many hours in the day, and I gotta write material for things I think people are actually going to adopt.)
Okay, next up – adoption trends over time. You’re going to be tempted to read something into this chart, but I need to explain something first: we saw a huge drop in Azure SQL DB users for SQL ConstantCare. In the past survey, we had exactly 500 Azure SQL DBs being monitored – and this round, it dropped to just 64. I talked briefly with a couple of the SaaS customers who stopped monitoring their databases, and they both said the same thing: “We’re not going to change the app’s code or indexes based on what you found, so we’re not going to monitor it further.” That’s fair – throwing cloud at it is a perfectly legit strategy. So now, having said that, let’s see the trends:
This quarter’s numbers are a little misleading because it looks like SQL Server 2019 stole Azure’s market share – but now you know why. If I look at pure installation numbers (not as a percentage):
The low early adoption rate of 2022 is more interesting to me when I combine it with another number: Availability Groups adoption is 26%, kinda. Of the production SQL Servers that can (2012 & newer, non-Azure, etc), 26% have turned on the Always On Availability Groups feature. Note that I didn’t say 26% of databases are protected, nor 26% of data volume – just 26% of the servers have the feature turned on, period, and that says something because the feature isn’t on by default, and requires a service restart to take effect. Actual databases protected is way, way less.
One of SQL Server 2022’s flagship features is Managed Instance link, the ability to fail over databases back & forth between your SQL Server 2022 instances and Azure SQL DB Managed Instance. In theory, that’s awesome. In practice, I’ve never seen a concise live demo setting it up, failing it over, and failing it back. The setup part 1 and part 2 doesn’t look terrible, and the failover looks fairly straightforward, but … there are no docs on troubleshooting it. Between the low adoption rates, the complexity of existing AGs, the complexity of cloud networking, and this brand new feature, I’m … not ready to dig into Managed Instance link anytime soon.
I totally appreciate those of y’all who have the guts to try it, though, especially in production. I think that kind of thing is the future of hybrid databases. Looking at the current population numbers, though, it’s a pretty far-off future.