What's new in SQL Server Management Studio for November 2025

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What's new in SQL Server Management Studio for November 2025
SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) version 22 was released on 11th November 2025 - this blog summarises the main changes SQL programmers will see

Posted by Andy Brown on 25 November 2025

In this blog

A new look and feel
Themes
A slight change to intellisense
Zooming in on results
Renaming tabs
Copilot in SSMS

I've covered the big changes introduced by SQL Server 2025 (the new vector data type, JSON data formats and other new SQL features) in separate blogs; this blog is specific to changes to the SQL Server Management Studio development environment.

A new look and feel

SSMS 22 (the confusing name for the version of SQL Server Management Studio released in November 2025) has a new look to it:

The old SSMS icon is on the left, the new one on the right

The software itself has a different look and feel to it:

Everything in the new SSMS (shown on the right) is less well-delineated.

Themes

You can now define a range of themes:

The range of themes that you can choose from. You could actually switch to a dark theme in the previous version of SSMS, but it wasn't easy to find the option.

Here's Mango Paradise, as shown selected above:

I'm not convinced this is mango coloured, and surely the word "paradise" overpromises ...

Implementing coloured themes for SSMS is a bit like creating a range of colour finishes for a raspberry pi computer. I think if I were going to start making SSMS cuddlier and more approachable I'd begin by enabling double-clicking on a table to see its contents.

A slight change to intellisense

This will help almost no one but me, but for me it'll change my life. If you are so backward that you still - ill-advisedly - can't get out of the habit of putting your commas after column names, not before, Intellisense now seems to work correctly:

Intellisense now appears even when you put commas after field names.

Hitherto I've been forced to type in the comma at the end of each line before using Intellisense to choose the column to show before it.

Zooming in on results

You can now zoom your top SQL and bottom results independently:

Here I've made the results much bigger.

The only way I could see to do this was using Ctrl and the mouse wheel, but I'm sure there's a menu option hidden away somewhere to do the same thing.

Renaming tabs

This seems completely pointless. You can rename a query tab:

You can right-click on any query tab to rename it, as long as you haven't already saved it.

However, as soon as you save a tab's SQL you lose the ability to rename it:

I've saved this query as bob.sql, so I can no longer rename its tab.

Copilot in SSMS

You can now use Copilot in Management Studio. This should be something to shout about, but Microsoft have made installing and using Copilot so hard (and so expensive) that I will continue to use separate AI tools to script SQL for the time being when I need help.

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