Announcing SQL Server Management Studio -16.3 (August 2016) Release

Today, we are very pleased to announce the latest generally-available (GA) quality release of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) following the SQL Server 2016 release. This update of SSMS features a switch from monthly-branded SSMS releases (e.g. August 2016 release) to numerically-branded SSMS releases (e.g. 16.3 release). This update also features a new Active Directory authentication option, new PowerShell cmdlets to help perform SQL Server login management, initial beta support for high-resolution displays, support for filtering in the ‘Databases’ node of the Object explorer, and many more improvements and bug fixes.

Get it here:                                                            Download SSMS 16.3 (August 2016) release

  • The version number for the latest release is 13.0.15700.28

New in this release

  1. SSMS monthly releases are now branded numerically.
  2. New authentication option 'Active Directory Universal Authentication' . This is a token-based authentication mechanism driven by Azure Active Directory that supports multi-factor, password, and integrated authentication mechanisms. Learn more about Active Directory Universal Authentication. ModernAuthentication1
  3. New Extended Events templates matching the functionality of SQL Server Profiler templates (Microsoft Connect item #2543925). Learn more about the included SQL Server Profiler templates.
    ExtendedEvents_ProfilerTemplates
  4. New 'Get-SqlLogin' and 'Remove-SqlLogin' cmdlets to help perform SQL Server login management using PowerShell(Microsoft Connect item #2588952).
  5. New PowerShell cmdlet 'New-SqlColumnMasterKeySettings' that adds support for creation of column master keys for arbitrary providers and key paths.
  6. New 'Create database' dialog to streamline creation of Azure SQL databases in SSMS.
  7. Support for filtering in the 'Databases' node of SSMS Object Explorer. Navigate to the 'Databases' node in Object explorer and click the filter icon in the Object explorer toolbar to filter the list of databases.
    DatabaseFilters
  8. Support for Azure-Resource Manager (ARM) type storage accounts in the Backup and Restore wizards.
  9. Initial beta support for high-resolution displays. You can learn more about how to enable this in this follow-up blog post.(Microsoft Connect item #1129301).
  10. Improvements in Database Engine Tuning Advisor (DTA) to support automatically reading a workload from the SQL Server Query Store.
  11. Improvements in Database Engine Tuning Advisor (DTA) to display index recommendations for clustered columnstore indexes, non-clustered columnstore indexes, and rowstore indexes.
  12. Support for sending Database Console (DBCC) commands using SQL Server Analysis Services PowerShell cmdlets.
  13. Bug fix to view cleartext of decrypted AlwaysEncrypted large object (LOB) columns in SSMS (Microsoft Connect item #2413024).
  14. Bug fix in Always Encrypted dialog to fix crash when Windows visual styles aren't enabled (e.g. enabling high contrast display).
  15. Bug fix for 'Method not found' error preventing connection to SQL Server instances (Microsoft Connect item #2925257).
  16. Bug fix for SSMS crash when creating a partition function with datetime offset.
  17. Bug fix to remove Microsoft .NET 3.5 requirement for starting Distributed Replay administration tool (DReplay.exe).
  18. Bug fix in Analysis Services Deployment wizard to support fully-qualified server names.
  19. Bug fix in SSMS to display partitions in Analysis Services tabular models with a 2016 compatibility model (Microsoft Connect item #2845053).
  20. Performance improvements and bug fixes in Analysis services tabular models, and SQL Server Shared Management Objects (SMO).
  21. Improvements to LQS and operator progress. You can learn more about this in this blog post.

Please visit the SSMS download page for additional details, and to see the full changelog.

Known Issues

The full list of known issues is available in Release notes available here.

Contact us

As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please visit our forum or Microsoft Connect page. You can also tweet our Engineering Manager at @sqltoolsguy on Twitter. We are fully committed to improve the SSMS experience and look forward to hearing from you!