Usually, database administrators upgrade the SQL Server versions for on-premise infrastructure. The AWS cloud infrastructure for SQL Server supports two flavors for database deployments.

• SQL Server deployed on the AWS EC2 instance
• An AWS managed instance relational database service

On the EC2 based SQL Server, DBAs are responsible for performing database upgrades, patching, applying cumulative packs. In this article, we discuss the minor and major version upgrades for AWS RDS SQL Server.

Minor version vs Major version upgrades

SQL Server regularly releases the service packs, hotfixes and cumulative packs for a specific version. If we apply them for SQL instance, it is known as Minor version upgrades. Starting from SQL Server 2017, Microsoft releases the cumulative packs only.

In the minor version upgrades, the changes are backward-compatible with an existing application and do not deprecate any existing functionality.

#aws #aws rds #sql server 2019