What is the Salesforce version naming and numbering schema?

Question

What is the apt way to comment on salesforce version. For example Salesforce has released SPRING 15, but I see the API Version as 33.0

What is SPRING 15 exactly termed?

Answer 1

Spring'15 is the friendly name for less technical human beings.

There are usually 3 releases per year: spring, summer and winter. The year is incremented at the winter release, so what we get in late 2015 will become winter'16

33.0 is the API version typically incremented by 1 each release, so Summer'15 will end up with 34.0

Both names can be used to address a release.

There is even a third internal version number you might hear in serious and tricky support cases. It was somthing like 188.0 the last time I had to deal with it. As far as I know, you can't see this number in Salesforce or in the documentation, so I was a bit puzzled first. But under the hood, this seems to be the real version.

Answer 2

The versions supported on your pod can be accessed by the API at https://<pod>.salesforce.com/services/data/ i.e. https://cs17.salesforce.com/services/data/

This will return a list of all the supported API versions, along with their 'friendly' name:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Versions>
  <Version>
    <label>Winter '11</label>
    <url>/services/data/v20.0</url>
    <version>20.0</version>
  </Version>
  ...
  <Version>
    <label>Spring '15</label>
    <url>/services/data/v33.0</url>
    <version>33.0</version>
  </Version>
</Versions>

You can also view the exact point release that is installed on a pod at https://success.salesforce.com/issues_releases_view?release=194000000 - this will show you the bugs fixed in a release, along with the exact versions installed on each pod down the right-hand side.