The build number for the initial release is : Imagine it is October 15th, 2022, and SQL Server 2022 has just been released. I'll illustrate some of these examples below.

The delta in build numbers (or an increase or decrease in size) between two updates does not necessarily reflect the number of fixes or changed lines of code.A newly-released update does not necessarily mean it contains all the fixes in an earlier update.A higher build number does not necessarily mean it contains all the fixes in a lower build number.You should not infer anything meaningful from specific build numbers, the size of an update, or the date an update was released. Build NumbersĮvery update bumps SQL Server to a new build number. The caveat is that you should apply any new CU in a dev or staging environment first, and really test your workloads (including backups and other scheduled jobs) against it, for at least a business cycle, before planning to deploy to production. I can understand some short-term restrictions and even some hesitancy for a new major version, but this shouldn't be permanent state. That said, I always strive for staying up to date on the CU path, and recommend customers and peers do the same. You can uninstall a Cumulative Update to try to downgrade back to GDR, for example, but this is not something I'd be excited to try in production – especially if multiple CUs have been installed. They can always jump to the CU path later – but the reverse is not necessarily as easy. An organization may not have the bandwidth or testing infrastructure to validate such a wide range of changes, so they opt instead to reduce their test coverage and risk of regression to just the areas that are fixed in GDRs. The primary reason is that non-critical fixes can require additional testing. Occasionally someone will ask why the GDR path exists at all. These updates do not include any of the non-GDR fixes in CUs, but they are also cumulative within GDR: if you install the GDR from last week, you also get all of the other GDR fixes before it. Depending on severity, they may be issued even after a branch is out of mainstream support. These are usually security-related (but not always), and are sometimes offered via Windows Update.

A GDR update contains one or more fixes that Microsoft deems critical.

Cumulative updates