Announcing SQL Server Requirement Changes in Chocolatey Central Management

Since the first stable release of Chocolatey Central Management all the way back in 2019, SQL Server 2008 has been required as a minimum if you were using your own database server. With the next release of Chocolatey Central Management that requirement changes to SQL Server 2012.

SQL Server 2008 was first released back in July 2012 with Mainstream support ending in July 2014 and Extended support in July 2019. Since that time Microsoft have made Security Updates available for Extended Support customers. That cycle comes to an end in July of this year if you are not using Azure. In short, SQL Server 2008 has served us all well, but it's time we moved on.

With the next release of Chocolatey Central Management, 0.9.0, slated for later this month, SQL Server 2012 or later will be required. If you use SQL Server 2008 / 2008 R2 as your database server for Chocolatey Central Management then you have three options to allow you to use the new version:

1. Upgrade your database server to at least SQL Server 2012, but preferably a later version of SQL Server that will give you a longer lifecycle.
2. Migrate your Chocolatey Central Management database to a new database server that is at least SQL Server 2012.
3. Do not upgrade to any version of Chocolatey Central Management later than 0.8.0.

:choco-warning: WARNING

While only one Chocolatey Central Management package applies database changes, installing or upgrading any of the packages to a version later than 0.8.0 while you are using SQL Server 2008 / 2008 R2 for the database, will cause Chocolatey Central Management to stop working.

To help protect our customers, we have added checks to the Chocolatey Central Management packages that will try to detect the version of SQL Server being used and stop the installation if it does not meet the minimum requirements. Due to the complex format of version information returned by SQL Server, these checks do their best to protect you, but they may get it wrong. You must ensure that you are using SQL Server 2012, as a minimum, for the Chocolatey Central Management database. If you know you meet the minimum requirements of SQL Server 2012 and the package fails to detect this, you can skip the checks by adding --params="'/OverrideSqlServerCompatibilityCheck'" to the Chocolatey CLI command line when upgrading or installing.

I hope this gives our customers enough information to plan for the upcoming release of Chocolatey Central Management 0.9.0. If you do have any further questions, you can find your support options by running choco support from the command line.