The short story: SQL Server 2019 appears poised to swallow the SQL Server market altogether, hahaha.

The long story: ever wonder how fast people are adopting new versions of SQL Server, or what’s “normal” out there for SQL Server adoption rates? Let’s find out in the winter 2023 version of our SQL ConstantCare® population report.

Out of the thousands of monitored SQL Servers, SQL Server 2019 is now at 48% of the market! That’s the highest percentage we’ve seen for any version in the 3 years that we’ve been doing this analysis, up from last quarter’s 44% market share. Here’s how adoption is trending over time, with the most recent data at the right:

SQL Server 2019 still continues to grow while everything else shrinks, with the exception of 2022 treading water:

• SQL Server 2022: 7%, up from 5% last quarter
• SQL Server 2019: 49%, holding pretty steady
• SQL Server 2017: 15%, holding steady
• SQL Server 2016: 18%, down from 22%
• SQL Server 2014: 6%, steady – and goes out of support in just 2 months!
• SQL Server 2012 & prior: 4%
• Azure SQL DB and Managed Instances: 1%
• New metric this month: 4% of the SQL Servers here are Amazon RDS. They’re included in the SQL Server 2019/2017/2016 metrics above, since they’re technically part of those crowds.

How big are typical SQL Servers?Let’s group the market together roughly into quarters:

For a long time in the SQL Server space, people have used the term VLDB to denote a very large database, and we’ve usually marked 1TB as the town borders of VLDBville. Today, given that about 1/4 of all SQL Servers host 1TB or more, and given how fast modern storage is able to back up 1TB databases, that 1TB threshold is less meaningful.

That large number of small servers means the CPU distribution is also fairly small:

As is the memory target distribution:

Although if you slice & dice by data size, then that changes the CPU & memory numbers differently. The number of CPU cores people typically use for >3TB SQL Servers is very different than the core count for, say, 50-250GB servers. And now if you’ll excuse me, I gotta do a whole bunch of slicing and dicing because I share that data with clients when we’re analyzing their SQL Servers during a SQL Critical Care®.