There’s been some confusion lately about the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) installation process for version 21.
Before Microsoft released SSMS 21, you had to download an installer file for each release (ever since SSMS was released as a standalone product with v16). This file eventually grew to be over 1GB, which is a significant download, especially in the case of a minor update.
With SSMS 21, Microsoft changed SSMS to use the Visual Studio installer. (You don’t need a Visual Studio license to install SSMS.)
The VS installer is a way to install, manage, and update SSMS components using this infrastructure. Updates are much smaller now, and can be handled using the same mechanism that powers Visual Studio.
So, if you haven’t downloaded SSMS 21 already, all you need is the installer stub EXE, which is tiny.
Yes, you have to scroll a little on the documentation page to get the download file. That’s intentional, to stop people downloading it unnecessarily.
When you run the stub file on your Windows machine, it will download all the packages it needs to make sure SSMS 21 is at the latest version.
Then, whenever there’s an update, you can use the existing VS installer to manage those updates. This goes for other SSMS components as well, such as the Migration component.
All of this is explained in the product documentation (https://aka.ms/ssms), but it seems folks don’t want to read anything these days.
I can’t help people like that, but since you made it all the way to the end, perhaps you can help them instead.