Uninstalling CUs/Downgrading SQL Server in Linux(RHEL7)

Back in 2011 I wrote an article on how to uninstall service packs in version SQL 2008/R2 which was quite a popular post at that time based on my wordpress stats. (Well, SQL 2008 was the very first version that allowed us to do that) Fast forward to year 2020 where we can have SQL Server running on Linux in production environments, let’s see how to achieve the same if you ever want to uninstall a cumulative update. Did you notice, I said CU, not service packs this time. See this post for more info on MSM.

First thing first, let’s see what we have got on the box. Pulling that information is quite simple, Run “sudo yum info mssql-server” which should return something like this.

Of course you can get this info from SQL or several other ways in Linux. Okay, now we know we got SQL Server 2019 CU5 running on this server to work with. Let’s just assume CU5 broke something in my database and I want to go back to CU4. How do I do that?

Run “sudo yum downgrade mssql-server-<your_desired_version_number>.x86_64“. Okay, so how do I get those version number details? Microsoft has those details maintained and updated regularly in their release notes. Check below links for 2019 or 2017 based on your version.
SQL 2019 release notes.
SQL 2017 release notes.

Also, We can get this information directly using YUM super powers as shown below…
“sudo yum list mssql-server –showduplicates”

If you want additional details for individual packages as shown below, just replace “list” with “info”, the command would be “sudo yum info mssql-server –showduplicates”

Now that we have all the information what we need, let’s go to the actual fun part.

Downgrading from SQL 2019 Cu5 to CU4:
Command:
sudo yum downgrade mssql-server-15.0.4033.1-2.x86_64

As you can see it clearly states that CU5 was removed and CU4 was downloaded and installed successfully 🙂

BTW, the basic golden rule still remains the same,  you can’t downgrade to a lower version(from SQL 2019 to 2017, –> Nope, that’s not how downgrade works)! You are allowed to do whatever you want as long as you are staying at same version.