How to find Operating System version using SQL query

There are some cases you wanted to check the Operating system installed on your SQL server. You may not have remote login access to the server where SQL server is installed in that case it will be difficult to know what is the operating system installed on your server where SQL database is installed.

In this article I am going to explain you the simple query which you can run in your SQL server Query analyzer and it will show you the Operating System version installed on your database server.

SQL Server by default provides you an inbuilt table with all the details of the operating system installed on your database server. sys.dm_os_windows_info is the table you may query in this regard.

Your final query will be,

SELECT windows_release, windows_service_pack_level, windows_sku, os_language_version

FROM sys.dm_os_windows_info

And the output of the above query will be,

windows_release	windows_service_pack_level	windows_sku	os_language_version
6.1	Service Pack 1	10	1033

In the above result you can see that windows release is 6.1 means Windows Server 2008 R2 in my case. It can be Windows 7 if your database is not installed on the server.

You can find all the operating system version number in below chart.

Operating system	Version number
Windows 8.1	6.3
Windows Server 2012 R2	6.3
Windows 8	6.2
Windows Server 2012	6.2
Windows 7	6.1
Windows Server 2008 R2	6.1
Windows Server 2008	6
Windows Vista	6
Windows Server 2003 R2	5.2
Windows Server 2003	5.2
Windows XP 64-Bit Edition	5.2
Windows XP	5.1
Windows 2000	5