SQL Server 2025 has been officially announced at Microsoft Ignite 2025 and is now generally available. It had been in public preview since May of 2025 and consumers have been eagerly anticipating the official release of one of Microsoft's most popular software products. I had previous written a fun article where I used AI and historical date like previews, events, and past release dates to try and guess the release date of SQL Server 2025.
Now it's finally here, and with it comes a whole host of highly anticipated features, most notably AI integration.
Major Themes
Built-in AI & vector search
- SQL Server 2025 adds native support for vector-stores/indexing (via DiskANN) enabling semantic search over large datasets.
- You can combine traditional keyword SQL queries with vector‐based search in one engine.
- Support for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) patterns, connecting to AI models via REST endpoints, etc.
Modern developer productivity enhancements
- Native JSON support, regular expression support, REST APIs, GraphQL via Data API Builder, etc.
- The idea is to let developers build AI-driven/modern applications whether on-premises or cloud with more extensibility.
Security, performance & scalability
- New authentication support via Microsoft Entra ID managed identities and outbound authentication via Azure Arc for hybrid/edge.
- Improved query optimization: e.g., persisted statistics on replicas, improved locking mechanisms (TID Locking, LAQ) to reduce contention, improved batch processing and columnstore support for analytics.
Hybrid and cloud‐centric analytics & data integration
- Integration with Microsoft Fabric: near real-time replication of SQL Server data (mirrored database) into OneLake for analytics.
- Better support for hybrid cloud, on-premises, and edge scenarios — managing, governing, monitoring across environments with Azure Arc, centralized management etc.
Why this matters
- The database is being positioned as a first‐class AI platform, not just a relational engine.
- For companies with large datasets, or those looking to embed AI/semantic search capabilities, this version could significantly change how they build data and app-architectures.
- For hybrid/edge scenarios (on-premises + cloud + edge), the enhancements around Azure Arc, Fabric integration, and real-time replication make it easier to maintain consistency, governance, and analytics across environments.
- Developers get more flexible tooling (JSON, REST, GraphQL etc) so the barrier to building modern apps on top of the database is lower.
- Performance/scalability/security updates mean this is not just “shiny new features” but also foundation
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