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A few days ago Microsoft announced RTM version of SQL Server 2019 finally and we are willing to install and use it on our business intelligence server.

We are already using Microsoft SQL Server 2019 Community Technology Preview 3.0 (CTP 3.0) so I gave it a shot to do in-place upgrade. However, Installation wizard detects CTP version and tries to install a new named instance. Obviously we don't want that.

I checked release notes but couldn't find anything about in-place upgrade support from CTP to RTM.

Questions:

  • Does anyone tried and succeed in-place upgrade from CTP to RTM version?
  • Is 'Uninstalling CTP and Installing RTM' the only way?

Update

  • I tried both Version Upgrade and Edition Upgrade using Installer but both didn't help.

It looks like uninstalling CTP components and then installing brand new Enterprise RTM is the only and correct way to do this.

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I cannot find anything specific to SQL Server 2019, but I was able to find unofficial references about previous versions of SQL Server not supporting CTP to RTM upgrades. Additionally, the reference Bahtiyar posted in the comments also shows that upgrades from previous versions of 2019 are not included. Once the RTM is available, the documentation for the CTP builds is gone, so I'm not sure if this limitation is included in the documentation of the pre-RTM releases.

This makes sense from the standpoint that the preview and release candidate versions are not licensed, supported versions. Supporting upgrades from these versions would require Microsoft to spend a lot of additional resources in testing those upgrades. Additionally, this might encourage customers to put a production workload on a CTP or release candidate build thinking they can just upgrade to RTM, so by not supporting that upgrade, they are discouraging customers from putting production workloads on unsupported versions.

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  • I mostly agree with your comments and it is totally understandable from Microsoft's point of view why this is not supported. Nevertheless I am a bit surprised that there is almost nothing on internet about this process. I was expecting some unofficial references as you mentioned.
    – Bahtiyar Samet Çoban
    Nov 8, 2019 at 14:01
  • @BahtiyarSametÇoban I agree 100%. Certainly Microsoft could easily include this explicitly in the referenced documentation. It would also be nice to have a clear warning in the pre-release installers that upgrades to later releases are not supported.
    – Tony Hinkle
    Nov 8, 2019 at 14:24

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