New season, New software, New servicing model

Greetings. It feels like a lot of change is in the air! Last Friday marked the Autumnal equinox. Depending upon which hemisphere you live in, the changes you might see with the new season might differ. People living in northern hemisphere welcome Fall season while folks in southern hemisphere welcome Spring.

If you are working in the database field, you could not have missed the announcements of astronomical proportions coming from the Ignite conference this week. Specifically, for SQL Server, Scott Guthrie and Rohan Kumar announced the general availability of SQL Server 2017. You can read the complete announcement from Rohan Kumar @ Microsoft for the Modern Data Estate. Lot of customers, users and fans of SQL Server will be excited to deploy SQL Server across different platforms as well as experience the amazing new features introduced.

While the engineering team was busy getting ready to release the product, lot of engineers from the support team participated in reviewing the product behavior, providing feedback, filing bugs, tracking changes and getting trained on new technologies and so on. The support team is all geared up and ready to work with customers who will start deploying the new release.

New product release provides an opportunity to innovate how we service the product as well. You might have seen the announcements from SQL Server Release Services about the modern servicing model for SQL Server. My friend Pedro Lopes has blogged about this in great detail along with a FAQ @ Announcing the Modern Servicing Model for SQL Server. Please take the time to read through all the details and information provided. This will help you prepare to keep your SQL Server install base healthy and up to date on patches, fixes, improvements. When you are working with members of our support team you will hear about these changes – especially if you need a fix/change for the product.

Let us all welcome the new season, the new software and the new ways in which we will get updates! Looking forward to working with all of you on the new scenarios and possibilities the new software opens for all of us.

Suresh Kandoth / Pradeep M.M. / Arun Kumar K

[On behalf of all SQL Server support engineers, managers and escalation engineers]