Upgrades of the Microsoft SQL Server DB engine
When Amazon RDS supports a new version of a database engine, you can upgrade your DB instances to the new version. There are two kinds of upgrades for SQL Server DB instances: major version upgrades and minor version upgrades.
Major version upgrades can contain database changes that are not backward-compatible with existing applications. As a result, you must manually perform major version upgrades of your DB instances. You can initiate a major version upgrade by modifying your DB instance. However, before you perform a major version upgrade, we recommend that you test the upgrade by following the steps described in Testing an RDS for SQL Server upgrade.
In contrast, minor version upgrades include only changes that are backward-compatible with existing applications. You can initiate a minor version upgrade manually by modifying your DB instance.
... "ValidUpgradeTarget": [ { "Engine": "sqlserver-se", "EngineVersion": "14.00.3281.6.v1", "Description": "SQL Server 2017 14.00.3281.6.v1", "AutoUpgrade": false, "IsMajorVersionUpgrade": false } ...
For more information about performing upgrades, see Upgrading a SQL Server DB instance. For information about what SQL Server versions are available on Amazon RDS, see Amazon RDS for Microsoft SQL Server.
Topics
Upgrading a SQL Server DB instance
For information about manually or automatically upgrading a SQL Server DB instance, see the following:
Important
If you have any snapshots that are encrypted using AWS KMS, we recommend that you initiate an upgrade before support ends.
Upgrading deprecated DB instances before support ends
After a major version is deprecated, you can't install it on new DB instances. RDS will try to automatically upgrade all existing DB instances.
If you need to restore a deprecated DB instance, you can do point-in-time recovery (PITR) or restore a snapshot. Doing this gives you temporary access a DB instance that uses the version that is being deprecated. However, after a major version is fully deprecated, these DB instances will also be automatically upgraded to a supported version.
