SQL Server 2025 Preview was announced Monday during Microsoft’s Build conference, so I figured I’d cover the installation process and first impressions in a blog post.
If containers are your thing, then check out this post about creating SQL Server 2025 containers.
Download
You can download the SQL Server 2025 Preview installer from here.
Once the SQL2025-SSEI-Eval.exe file is downloaded I execute it.
Similar, to the previous versions of SQL Server, you get a menu with 3 options:
- Basic – this skips most of the customization options.
- Custom – goes through the entire install process where you can customize various configuration options.
- Download Media – just downloads the installation media that you can use at a later time.
I opt to download the installation media, because I’ll want to reuse it later when spinning up test instances via my automated process.
Once the download finishes, I get a message informing me that the download was successful.
At this point, I can close this window, and I can mount the resulting .ISO file by double clicking on it.
Installation
I’ll be using a Windows Server 2025 VM as the host of the instance.
With the .ISO file mounted, I navigate to the virtual DVD drive and run setup.exe as admin.
Aside from some spiffy new icons, the Installation Center doesn’t appear to have changed much.
So, I proceed with the installation.
And the first noticeable difference is already present in the Free Edition selection drop-down menu.
Developer Edition has been split in two options:
- Standard Developer – which has the same capacity and compute limitations as Standard Edition.
- Enterprise Developer – which is the re-branded Developer Edition that has 1:1 feature and capacity parity with Enterprise Edition.
This comes as a result of developers requesting an edition of SQL Server that is still free for development and testing, but has the same limitations as the environments of some of their customers.
Not everyone has the money or use case to go with SQL Server Enterprise Edition.
In this case, I pick Enterprise Developer and proceed with the installation.
The familiar Windows Firewall warning is still there, but I can sort it later with my PowerShell script.
Here, I uncheck “Azure Extension for SQL Server” and move on.
In the Feature Selection section, I check Database Engine, set a custom Instance Root Directory, because I don’t like dumping the database files on the C drive.
And I already had the target directories created beforehand.
| 1 2 3 4 | mkdir E:\MSSQL\2025\Data mkdir E:\MSSQL\2025\TLog mkdir E:\MSSQL\2025\TempDB mkdir E:\MSSQL\2025\Backup |
Note: SQL Server 2025 Preview appears to not have some of features.
For comparison, SQL Server 2022 has Data Quality Services under Instance Features, and Data Quality Client, and Master Data Services under Shared Features.
In the next screen I set SQL2025 as the instance name/ID, and click on Next.
I set the SQL Server Browser service to Automatic start because I want to be able to connect to the instance from my PC by just specifying the hostname and instance ID.
And also check the “Grant Volume Maintenance Tasks privilege….” check box.
I’ll leave the instance with the default collation and click Next.
In the following section, I switch to Mixed Mode authentication, set a password for the sa account. and add my current Windows user as an admin.
Afterwards, I proceed to the Data Directories section.
Where I configure the database directories to the previously created paths.
And then move forward with TempDB’s configuration. And I set the data and log directories (1,2), specify initial sizes and auto-growth increments.
I’m not planning on doing anything TempDB-intensive, but I can always change these values at any point after the installation is done.
In the MaxDOP section I don’t change anything, I just validate that the installation wizard picked a value that matches my host’s configuration. In this case it set MaxDOP to 4 because my VM has 4 CPU cores.
As for memory I chuckle at the 128MB recommendation.
And replace it with something more realistic.
In this case, I’m not doing anything with FILESTREAM, so I just ignore that portion completely.
I make a note of the path where the configuration file was created, because I’ll need it to automate future installations of 2025, and I click on Install.
On my VM™ the installation completed in around 3 minutes, I then restart the VM.
As a post install step, I configure the TCP/IP protocol, set a static port and add firewall rules.
All in one go using my SetSQLServerStaticPort.ps1 script.
| 1 | .\SetSQLServerStaticPort.ps1 SQL2025 2025 1433 -AddFirewallRules |
Connecting to the new SQL Server 2025 instance
And, finally, to test if everything is working as expected.
I connect to the newly installed SQL Server 2025 preview instance.
Conclusion
The changes to the installation process are minimal.
The most noticeable and pleasant surprise is the addition of the Standard Developer Edition, which should make developing/testing for Standard Edition more accessible for developers.