Release notes for SQL Server 2017 on Linux

Applies to: SQL Server (all supported versions) - Linux

The following release notes apply to SQL Server 2017 (14.x) running on Linux. This article is broken into sections for each release. The GA release has detailed supportability and known issues listed. Each cumulative update (CU) or general distribution release (GDR) has a link to a support article describing the CU changes as well as links to the Linux package downloads.

Supported platforms

Tools

Most existing client tools that target SQL Server can seamlessly target SQL Server running on Linux. Some tools might have a specific version requirement to work well with Linux. For a full list of SQL Server tools, see SQL Tools and Utilities for SQL Server.

Release history

The following table lists the release history for SQL Server 2017 (14.x).

How to install updates

If you have configured the CU repository (mssql-server-2017), then you will get the latest CU of SQL Server packages when you perform new installations. The CU repository is the default for all package installation articles for SQL Server on Linux. If you have configured the GDR repository (mssql-server-2017-gdr), you will only get critical security updates released since GA. If you require Docker container CU or GDR updates, please see official images for Microsoft SQL Server on Linux for Docker Engine. For more information about repository configuration, see Configure repositories for SQL Server on Linux.

If you are updating existing SQL Server packages, run the appropriate update command for each package to get the latest CU. For specific update instructions for each package, see the following installation guides:

• Install SQL Server package
• Install Full-text Search package
• Install SQL Server Integration Services
• Enable SQL Server Agent

CU27 (October 2021)

This is the Cumulative Update 27 (CU27) release of SQL Server 2017 (14.x). The SQL Server Database Engine version for this release is 14.0.3421.10. For information about the fixes and improvements in this release, see https://support.microsoft.com/help/5006944.

Package details

For manual or offline package installations, you can download the RPM and Debian packages with the information in the following table:

CU26 (September 2021)

This is the Cumulative Update 26 (CU26) release of SQL Server 2017 (14.x). The SQL Server Database Engine version for this release is 14.0.3411.3. For information about the fixes and improvements in this release, see https://support.microsoft.com/help/5005226.

Package details

For manual or offline package installations, you can download the RPM and Debian packages with the information in the following table:

CU25 (July 2021)

This is the Cumulative Update 25 (CU25) release of SQL Server 2017 (14.x). The SQL Server Database Engine version for this release is 14.0.3401.7. For information about the fixes and improvements in this release, see https://support.microsoft.com/help/5003830.

Package details

For manual or offline package installations, you can download the RPM and Debian packages with the information in the following table:

CU24 (May 2021)

This is the Cumulative Update 24 (CU24) release of SQL Server 2017 (14.x). The SQL Server Database Engine version for this release is 14.0.3391.2. For information about the fixes and improvements in this release, see https://support.microsoft.com/help/5001228.

Package details

For manual or offline package installations, you can download the RPM and Debian packages with the information in the following table:

CU23 (February 2021)

This is the Cumulative Update 23 (CU23) release of SQL Server 2017 (14.x). The SQL Server Database Engine version for this release is 14.0.3381.3. For information about the fixes and improvements in this release, see https://support.microsoft.com/help/5000685.

Package details

For manual or offline package installations, you can download the RPM and Debian packages with the information in the following table:

CU22-GDR (January 2021)

This is the Cumulative Update 22-GDR (CU22-GDR) release of SQL Server 2017 (14.x). The SQL Server Database Engine version for this release is 14.0.3370.1. For information about the fixes and improvements in this release, see https://support.microsoft.com/help/4577467.

Package details

For manual or offline package installations, you can download the RPM and Debian packages with the information in the following table:

CU22 (September 2020)

This is the Cumulative Update 22 (CU22) release of SQL Server 2017 (14.x). The SQL Server Database Engine version for this release is 14.0.3356.20. For information about the fixes and improvements in this release, see https://support.microsoft.com/help/4577467.

Package details

For manual or offline package installations, you can download the RPM and Debian packages with the information in the following table:

CU21 (July 2020)

This is the Cumulative Update 21 (CU21) release of SQL Server 2017 (14.x). The SQL Server Database Engine version for this release is 14.0.3335.7. For information about the fixes and improvements in this release, see https://support.microsoft.com/help/4557397.

Package details

For manual or offline package installations, you can download the RPM and Debian packages with the information in the following table:

CU20 (April 2020)

This is the Cumulative Update 20 (CU20) release of SQL Server 2017 (14.x). The SQL Server Database Engine version for this release is 14.0.3294.2. For information about the fixes and improvements in this release, see https://support.microsoft.com/help/4541283.

Package details

For manual or offline package installations, you can download the RPM and Debian packages with the information in the following table:

CU19 (February 2020)

This is the Cumulative Update 19 (CU19) release of SQL Server 2017 (14.x). The SQL Server Database Engine version for this release is 14.0.3281.6. For information about the fixes and improvements in this release, see https://support.microsoft.com/help/4535007.

Package details

For manual or offline package installations, you can download the RPM and Debian packages with the information in the following table:

CU18 (December 2019)

This is the Cumulative Update 18 (CU18) release of SQL Server 2017 (14.x). The SQL Server Database Engine version for this release is 14.0.3257.3. For information about the fixes and improvements in this release, see https://support.microsoft.com/help/4527377.

Package details

For manual or offline package installations, you can download the RPM and Debian packages with the information in the following table:

Added support

• Change Data Capture (CDC) is supported with SQL Server 2017 on Linux starting with CU18.
• Transactional Replication is supported with SQL Server 2017 on Linux starting with CU18.

Remarks

SQL Server 2017 containers now have a new tagging pattern as described below with examples.

• mcr.microsoft.com/mssql/server:<SQL Server Version>-<update>-<Linux Distribution>-<Linux Distribution Version>

  This will pull the container image with the combination described in the tag.

• mcr.microsoft.com/mssql/server:<SQL Server Version>-latest

  This will pull the latest SQL Server version on the latest supported Ubuntu version.

Examples:

mcr.microsoft.com/mssql/server:2017-CU18-ubuntu-16.04

This will pull SQL Server 2017 CU18 based on the Ubuntu 16.04 container.

mcr.microsoft.com/mssql/server:2017-latest

This will pull the latest SQL Server 2017 version (CU18 as the time of this writing) based on the Ubuntu 16.04 container.

CU17 (October 2019)

This is the Cumulative Update 17 (CU17) release of SQL Server 2017 (14.x). The SQL Server Database Engine version for this release is 14.0.3238.1. For information about the fixes and improvements in this release, see https://support.microsoft.com/help/4515579.

Package details

For manual or offline package installations, you can download the RPM and Debian packages with the information in the following table:

CU16 (August 2019)

This is the Cumulative Update 16 (CU16) release of SQL Server 2017 (14.x). The SQL Server Database Engine version for this release is 14.0.3223.3. For information about the fixes and improvements in this release, see https://support.microsoft.com/help/4508218.

What's New

Package details

For manual or offline package installations, you can download the RPM and Debian packages with the information in the following table:

CU15 (May 2019)

This is the Cumulative Update 15 (CU15) release of SQL Server 2017 (14.x). The SQL Server Database Engine version for this release is 14.0.3162.1. For information about the fixes and improvements in this release, see https://support.microsoft.com/help/4498951.

Package details

For manual or offline package installations, you can download the RPM and Debian packages with the information in the following table:

CU14 (Mar 2019)

This is the Cumulative Update 14 (CU14) release of SQL Server 2017 (14.x). The SQL Server Database Engine version for this release is 14.0.3076.1. For information about the fixes and improvements in this release, see https://support.microsoft.com/help/4484710.

Package details

For manual or offline package installations, you can download the RPM and Debian packages with the information in the following table:

CU13 (Dec 2018)

This is the Cumulative Update 13 (CU13) release of SQL Server 2017 (14.x). The SQL Server Database Engine version for this release is 14.0.3048.4. For information about the fixes and improvements in this release, see https://support.microsoft.com/help/4466404.

Package details

For manual or offline package installations, you can download the RPM and Debian packages with the information in the following table:

CU12 (Oct 2018)

This is the Cumulative Update 12 (CU12) release of SQL Server 2017 (14.x). The SQL Server Database Engine version for this release is 14.0.3045.24. For information about the fixes and improvements in this release, see https://support.microsoft.com/help/4464082.

Package details

For manual or offline package installations, you can download the RPM and Debian packages with the information in the following table:

CU11 (Sept 2018)

This is the Cumulative Update 11 (CU11) release of SQL Server 2017 (14.x). The SQL Server Database Engine version for this release is 14.0.3038.14. For information about the fixes and improvements in this release, see https://support.microsoft.com/help/4462262.

Package details

For manual or offline package installations, you can download the RPM and Debian packages with the information in the following table:

CU10 (Aug 2018)

This is the Cumulative Update 10 (CU10) release of SQL Server 2017 (14.x). The SQL Server Database Engine version for this release is 14.0.3037.1. For information about the fixes and improvements in this release, see https://support.microsoft.com/help/4342123.

Package details

For manual or offline package installations, you can download the RPM and Debian packages with the information in the following table:

CU9-GDR2 (Aug 2018)

This is a security update that also includes the previously released CU (CU9) for SQL Server 2017 (14.x). The SQL Server Database Engine version for this release is 14.0.3035.2. For information about the fixes and improvements in this release, see https://support.microsoft.com/help/4293805.

Package details

For manual or offline package installations, you can download the RPM and Debian packages with the information in the following table:

GDR2 (Aug 2018)

This is a security update that only includes the GDR2 (and GDR1) security fixes for SQL Server 2017 (14.x). The SQL Server Database Engine version for this release is 14.0.2002.14. For information about the fixes and improvements in this release, see https://support.microsoft.com/help/4293803.

Package details

For manual or offline package installations, you can download the RPM and Debian packages with the information in the following table:

CU9 (Jul 2018)

This is the Cumulative Update 9 (CU9) release of SQL Server 2017 (14.x). The SQL Server Database Engine version for this release is 14.0.3030.27. For information about the fixes and improvements in this release, see https://support.microsoft.com/help/4341265.

Package details

For manual or offline package installations, you can download the RPM and Debian packages with the information in the following table:

CU8 (Jun 2018)

This is the Cumulative Update 8 (CU8) release of SQL Server 2017 (14.x). The SQL Server Database Engine version for this release is 14.0.3029.16. For information about the fixes and improvements in this release, see https://support.microsoft.com/help/4338363.

Package details

For manual or offline package installations, you can download the RPM and Debian packages with the information in the following table:

CU7 (May 2018)

This is the Cumulative Update 7 (CU7) release of SQL Server 2017 (14.x). The SQL Server Database Engine version for this release is 14.0.3026.27. For information about the fixes and improvements in this release, see https://support.microsoft.com/help/4229789.

Package details

For manual or offline package installations, you can download the RPM and Debian packages with the information in the following table:

CU6 (Apr 2018)

This is the Cumulative Update 6 (CU6) release of SQL Server 2017 (14.x). The SQL Server Database Engine version for this release is 14.0.3025.34. For information about the fixes and improvements in this release, see https://support.microsoft.com/help/4101464.

Package details

For manual or offline package installations, you can download the RPM and Debian packages with the information in the following table:

CU5 (Mar 2018)

This is the Cumulative Update 5 (CU5) release of SQL Server 2017 (14.x). The SQL Server Database Engine version for this release is 14.0.3023.8. For information about the fixes and improvements in this release, see https://support.microsoft.com/help/4092643.

Known upgrade issue

When you upgrade from a previous release to CU5, SQL Server might fail to start with the following error:

Error: 4860, Severity: 16, State: 1.
Cannot bulk load. The file "C:\Install\SqlTraceCollect.dtsx" does not exist or you don't have file access rights.
Error: 912, Severity: 21, State: 2.
Script level upgrade for database 'master' failed because upgrade step 'msdb110_upgrade.sql' encountered error 200, state

To resolve this error, enable SQL Server Agent and restart SQL Server with the following commands:

sudo /opt/mssql/bin/mssql-conf set sqlagent.enabled true
sudo systemctl start mssql-server

Package details

For manual or offline package installations, you can download the RPM and Debian packages with the information in the following table:

CU4 (Feb 2018)

This is the Cumulative Update 4 (CU4) release of SQL Server 2017 (14.x). The SQL Server Database Engine version for this release is 14.0.3022.28. For information about the fixes and improvements in this release, see https://support.microsoft.com/help/4056498.

Package details

For manual or offline package installations, you can download the RPM and Debian packages with the information in the following table:

GDR1 (Jan 2018)

This is a security update that only includes the GDR1 security fixes for SQL Server 2017 (14.x). The SQL Server Database Engine version for this release is 14.0.2000.63. For information about the fixes and improvements in this release, see https://support.microsoft.com/help/4057122.

Package details

For manual or offline package installations, you can download the RPM and Debian packages with the information in the following table:

CU3 (Jan 2018)

This is the Cumulative Update 3 (CU3) release of SQL Server 2017 (14.x). The SQL Server Database Engine version for this release is 14.0.3015.40. For information about the fixes and improvements in this release, see https://support.microsoft.com/help/4052987.

Package details

For manual or offline package installations, you can download the RPM and Debian packages with the information in the following table:

CU2 (Nov 2017)

This is the Cumulative Update 2 (CU2) release of SQL Server 2017 (14.x). The SQL Server Database Engine version for this release is 14.0.3008.27. For information about the fixes and improvements in this release, see https://support.microsoft.com/help/4052574.

Package details

For manual or offline package installations, you can download the RPM and Debian packages with the information in the following table:

CU1 (Oct 2017)

This is the Cumulative Update 1 (CU1) release of SQL Server 2017 (14.x). The SQL Server Database Engine version for this release is 14.0.3006.16. For information about the fixes and improvements in this release, see https://support.microsoft.com/help/KB4053439.

Package details

For manual or offline package installations, you can download the RPM and Debian packages with the information in the following table:

GA (Oct 2017)

This is the General Availability (GA) release of SQL Server 2017 (14.x). The SQL Server Database Engine version for this release is 14.0.1000.169.

Package details

Package details and download locations for the RPM and Debian packages are listed in the following table. You don't need to download these packages directly if you use the steps in the following installation guides:

• Install SQL Server package
• Install Full-text Search package
• Install SQL Server Agent package
• Install SQL Server Integration Services

Known issues

The following sections describe known issues with the General Availability (GA) release of SQL Server 2017 (14.x) on Linux.

General

• The length of the hostname where SQL Server is installed needs to be 15 characters or less.

  • Resolution: Change the name in /etc/hostname to something 15 characters long or less.

• Manually setting the system time backwards in time will cause SQL Server to stop updating the internal system time within SQL Server.

  • Resolution: Restart SQL Server.

• Only single instance installations are supported.

  • Resolution: If you want to have more than one instance on a given host, consider using VMs or Docker containers.

• SQL Server Configuration Manager can't connect to SQL Server on Linux.

• The default language of the sa login is English.

  • Resolution: Change the language of the sa login with the ALTER LOGIN statement.

Databases

• The master database can't be moved with the mssql-conf utility. Other system databases can be moved with mssql-conf.

• When restoring a database that was backed up on SQL Server on Windows, you must use the WITH MOVE clause in the Transact-SQL statement.

• Certain algorithms (cipher suites) for Transport Layer Security (TLS) don't work properly with SQL Server on Linux. This results in connection failures when attempting to connect to SQL Server, as well as problems establishing connections between replicas in high availability groups.

  • Resolution: Modify the mssql.conf configuration script for SQL Server on Linux to disable problematic cipher suites, by doing the following:

    1. Add the following to /var/opt/mssql/mssql.conf.

       [network]
       tlsciphers= AES256-GCM-SHA384:AES128-GCM-SHA256:AES256-SHA256:AES128-SHA256:AES256-SHA:AES128-SHA:!ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:!ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:!ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:!ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:!ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA384:!ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA256:!ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA:!ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA:!ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384:!ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:!ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:!ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:!DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:!DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:!DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:!DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:!DHE-DSS-AES256-SHA256:!DHE-DSS-AES128-SHA256:!DHE-DSS-AES256-SHA:!DHE-DSS-AES128-SHA:!DHE-DSS-DES-CBC3-SHA:!NULL-SHA256:!NULL-SHA
       

       Note

       In the preceding code, ! negates the expression. This tells OpenSSL to not use the following cipher suite.

    2. Restart SQL Server with the following command.

       sudo systemctl restart mssql-server
       

• SQL Server 2014 (12.x) databases on Windows that use In-memory OLTP can't be restored on SQL Server 2017 (14.x) on Linux. To restore a SQL Server 2014 (12.x) database that uses in-memory OLTP, first upgrade the databases to SQL Server 2016 (13.x) or SQL Server 2017 (14.x) on Windows before moving them to SQL Server on Linux via backup/restore or detach/attach.

• User permission ADMINISTER BULK OPERATIONS is not supported on Linux at this time.

Networking

Features that involve outbound TCP connections from the sqlservr process, such as linked servers or Availability Groups, might not work if both the following conditions are met:

1. The target server is specified as a hostname and not an IP address.

2. The source instance has IPv6 disabled in the kernel. To verify if your system has IPv6 enabled in the kernel, all the following tests must pass:

   • cat /proc/cmdline will print the boot cmdline of the current kernel. The output must not contain ipv6.disable=1.
   • The /proc/sys/net/ipv6/ directory must exist.
   • A C program that calls socket(AF_INET6, SOCK_STREAM, IPPROTO_IP) should succeed - the syscall must return an fd != -1 and not fail with EAFNOSUPPORT.

The exact error depends on the feature. For linked servers, this manifests as a login timeout error. For Availability Groups, the ALTER AVAILABILITY GROUP JOIN DDL on the secondary will fail after 5 minutes with a download configuration timeout error.

To work around this issue, do one of the following:

1. Use IPs instead of hostnames to specify the target of the TCP connection.

2. Enable IPv6 in the kernel by removing ipv6.disable=1 from the boot cmdline. The way to do this depends on the Linux distribution and the bootloader, such as grub. If you do want IPv6 to be disabled, you can still disable it by setting net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1 in the sysctl configuration (for example, /etc/sysctl.conf). This will still prevent the system's network adapter from getting an IPv6 address, but allow the sqlservr features to work.

Network File System (NFS)

If you use Network File System (NFS) remote shares in production, note the following support requirements:

• Use NFS version 4.2 or higher. Older versions of NFS don't support required features, such as fallocate and sparse file creation, common to modern file systems.
• Locate only the /var/opt/mssql directories on the NFS mount. Other files, such as the SQL Server system binaries, are not supported.
• Ensure that NFS clients use the 'nolock' option when mounting the remote share.

Localization

• If your locale is not English (en_us) during setup, you must use UTF-8 encoding in your bash session/terminal. If you use ASCII encoding, you might see an error similar to the following:

  UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xf1' in position 8: ordinal not in range(128)
  

  If you can't use UTF-8 encoding, run setup using the MSSQL_LCID environment variable to specify your language choice.

  sudo MSSQL_LCID=<LcidValue> /opt/mssql/bin/mssql-conf setup
  

• When running mssql-conf setup, and performing a non-English installation of SQL Server, incorrect extended characters are displayed after the localized text, "Configuring SQL Server...". Or, for non-Latin based installations, the sentence might be missing completely. The missing sentence should display the following localized string: "The licensing PID was successfully processed. The new edition is [<Name> edition]". This string is output for information purposes only, and the next SQL Server Cumulative Update will address this for all languages. This doesn't affect the successful installation of SQL Server in any way.

Full-Text Search

• Not all filters are available with this release, including filters for Office documents. For a list of supported filters, see Install SQL Server Full-Text Search on Linux.

SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)

• The mssql-server-is package isn't supported on SUSE in this release. It's currently supported on Ubuntu and on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

• With Integration Services on Linux CTP 2.1 Refresh and later, Integration Services packages can use ODBC connections on Linux. This functionality has been tested with the SQL Server and the MySQL ODBC drivers, but is also expected to work with any Unicode ODBC driver that observes the ODBC specification. At design time, you can provide either a DSN or a connection string to connect to the ODBC data; you can also use Windows authentication. For more info, see the blog post announcing ODBC support on Linux.

• The following features aren't supported in this release when you run SSIS packages on Linux:

  • Integration Services Catalog database
  • Scheduled package execution by SQL Agent
  • Windows Authentication
  • Third-party components
  • Change Data Capture (CDC)
  • Integration Services Scale Out
  • Azure Feature Pack for SSIS
  • Hadoop and HDFS support
  • Microsoft Connector for SAP BW

For a list of built-in SSIS components that are not currently supported, or that are supported with limitations, see Limitations and known issues for SSIS on Linux.

For more info about SSIS on Linux, see the following articles:

• Blog post announcing SSIS support for Linux.
• Install SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) on Linux
• Extract, transform, and load data on Linux with SSIS

SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)

The following limitations apply to SQL Server Management Studio on Windows connected to SQL Server on Linux.

• Maintenance plans aren't supported.

• Management Data Warehouse (MDW) and the data collector in SQL Server Management Studio aren't supported.

• SQL Server Management Studio UI components that have Windows Authentication or Windows event log options don't work with Linux. You can still use these features with other options, such as SQL logins.

• Number of log files to retain can't be modified.

Next steps

To get started, see the following quickstarts:

• Install on Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• Install on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
• Install on Ubuntu
• Run on Docker
• Provision a SQL VM in Azure
• Run & Connect - Cloud

For answers to frequently asked questions, see the SQL Server on Linux FAQ.