The “Guess the Next Release Date” contest continues…

Back in December 2017, when I posted the Guess the Next SQL Server Release Date Contest, you could leave your guess in the comments for a chance to win a Live Class Season Pass and a Recorded Class Season Pass.

Here’s how the guesses so far have gone – and for this quick analysis, I’m only including people who followed the rules, not people who put a bunch of text in their comment. When it comes time to pick a winner, I’ll go through the text ones too.

Looks like most folks expected it to be around the end of last year, 2018. I talked to a few folks about where their guesses came from, and they’d taken hints from the 2017 post from the Release Services team about the new Modern Servicing Model. At that time, Microsoft wrote:

CUs will be delivered more often at first and then less frequently. Every month for the first 12 months, and every quarter for the remainder 4 years of the full 5-year mainstream lifecycle.

Between that, and the quick cadence between SQL Server 2016 and 2017, they suspected that Microsoft would be shipping a new version of SQL Server every year. Made sense at the time. (Later, Microsoft revisited that support policy.)

Now, looking back:

• SQL Server 2012: 2012-04-01
• SQL Server 2014: 2014-04-21 (~25 months later)
• SQL Server 2016: 2016-06-01 (~25 months later)
• SQL Server 2017: 2017-10-02 (~16 months later)
• Today, 2019-02-04: 16 months later

The SQL Server 2019 release cadence is actually slower than the 2017 pace. Interesting. The 2019 release is definitely more ambitious – Kubernetes, Big Data Clusters, batch mode for rowstore queries – there’s a lot of huuuuge stuff in here.

Something to think about as you place your guess. Good luck!

Update 2019/03/01 – closed comments here since folks got confused as to where the contest is happening.