Announcing SQL Server 2017 Cumulative Update 25: The Silver Anniversary

SQL Server 2017 doesn’t have service packs, only cumulative updates, so this release marks something a little special: the Silver Anniversary. For the first time, a single version of SQL Server has had twenty-five consecutive cumulative updates.

As we all know, silver is the appropriate gift for a 25th anniversary, and there’s only one silver gift that can possibly suffice. We hereby present Microsoft with a sculpture made from the finest bent silver:

Now that we’ve got the ceremonies out of the way, let’s talk about CU25 for SQL Server 2017. Among other treasures, it includes:

• The phone-home telemetry sends data to a new place – you know that CEIP Service that sends your database names and encryption levels to Microsoft? They’re finally letting you turn it off! Just kidding.
• Wrong query results from columnstore indexes – at first this sounds like only index rebuilds affect it, but note that tuple mover activity also affects it, and that can happen at any time in the background.
• Added new distributed name listener for AGs
• Fixes issue where database freezes its IO during a VSS backup, but never thaws it
• And a bunch more

Go get ’em!