Major version upgrades for RDS for SQL Server

Amazon RDS currently supports the following major version upgrades to a Microsoft SQL Server DB instance.

You can upgrade your existing DB instance to SQL Server 2017 or 2019 from any version except SQL Server 2008. To upgrade from SQL Server 2008, first upgrade to one of the other versions.

You can use an AWS CLI query, such as the following example, to find the available upgrades for a particular database engine version.

aws rds describe-db-engine-versions \
    --engine sqlserver-se \
    --engine-version 14.00.3281.6.v1 \
    --query "DBEngineVersions[*].ValidUpgradeTarget[*].{EngineVersion:EngineVersion}" \
    --output table

aws rds describe-db-engine-versions ^
    --engine sqlserver-se ^
    --engine-version 14.00.3281.6.v1 ^
    --query "DBEngineVersions[*].ValidUpgradeTarget[*].{EngineVersion:EngineVersion}" ^
    --output table

--------------------------
|DescribeDBEngineVersions|
+------------------------+
|      EngineVersion     |
+------------------------+
|  14.00.3294.2.v1       |
|  14.00.3356.20.v1      |
|  14.00.3381.3.v1       |
|  14.00.3401.7.v1       | 
|  14.00.3421.10.v1      |
|  14.00.3451.2.v1       |
|  15.00.4043.16.v1      |
|  15.00.4073.23.v1      |
|  15.00.4153.1.v1       |
|  15.00.4198.2.v1       |
|  15.00.4236.7.v1       |
+------------------------+

Database compatibility level

You can use Microsoft SQL Server database compatibility levels to adjust some database behaviors to mimic previous versions of SQL Server. For more information, see Compatibility level in the Microsoft documentation. When you upgrade your DB instance, all existing databases remain at their original compatibility level.

You can change the compatibility level of a database by using the ALTER DATABASE command. For example, to change a database named customeracct to be compatible with SQL Server 2016, issue the following command:

ALTER DATABASE customeracct SET COMPATIBILITY_LEVEL = 130