Release cycles

Microsoft has made a few major public-facing changes in the past five years. These changes include a departure from longer release cycles for their main products and a transition towards subscription-based services, for example, Office 365 and Azure services. The ideas surrounding continuous delivery and agile software development have also shaped the way that Microsoft has been delivering their flagship integrated development environment, Visual Studio, with new releases approximately every six months. This change in philosophy is now flowing into the development cycle of SQL Server. Due to the similarly constant release cycle of the cloud-version of SQL Server (Azure SQL Database), Microsoft wants to keep both the cloud and on-premises versions of the product as close to each other as possible. As such, it is not a surprise to see that the previous release cycle of every three to five years is being replaced by much shorter intervals. A clear example of this was that SQL Server 2016 released to the market in June of 2016, with a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the next version of SQL Server being released in November of 2016. The wave of technology progress stops for no one. This is clearly true in the case of SQL Server!