Microsoft SQL Server 2025: An enterprise database prepared for artificial intelligence from the ground up
The data estate and applications of Azure clients are facing new difficulties as a result of the growing use of AI technology. With privacy and security being more crucial than ever, the majority of enterprises anticipate deploying AI workloads across a hybrid mix of cloud, edge, and dedicated infrastructure.
In order to address these issues, Microsoft SQL Server 2025, which is now in preview, is an enterprise AI-ready database from ground to cloud that applies AI to consumer data. With the addition of new AI capabilities, this version builds on SQL Server’s thirty years of speed and security innovation. Customers may integrate their data with Microsoft Fabric to get the next generation of data analytics. The release leverages Microsoft Azure innovation for customers’ databases and supports hybrid setups across cloud, on-premises datacenters, and edge.
SQL Server is now much more than just a conventional relational database. With the most recent release of SQL Server, customers can create AI applications that are intimately integrated with the SQL engine. With its built-in filtering and vector search features, SQL Server 2025 is evolving into a vector database in and of itself. It performs exceptionally well and is simple for T-SQL developers to use.
AI built-in
This new version leverages well-known T-SQL syntax and has AI integrated in, making it easier to construct AI applications and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) patterns with safe, efficient, and user-friendly vector support. This new feature allows you to create a hybrid AI vector search by combining vectors with your SQL data.
Utilize your company database to create AI apps
Bringing enterprise AI to your data, SQL Server 2025 is a vector database that is enterprise-ready and has integrated security and compliance. DiskANN, a vector search technology that uses disk storage to effectively locate comparable data points in massive datasets, powers its own vector store and index. Accurate data retrieval through semantic searching is made possible by these databases’ effective chunking capability. With the most recent version of SQL Server, you can employ AI models from the ground up thanks to the engine’s flexible AI model administration through Representational State Transfer (REST) interfaces.
Furthermore, extensible, low-code tools provide versatile model interfaces within the SQL engine, backed via T-SQL and external REST APIs, regardless of whether clients are working on data preprocessing, model training, or RAG patterns. By seamlessly integrating with well-known AI frameworks like LangChain, Semantic Kernel, and Entity Framework Core, these tools improve developers’ capacity to design a variety of AI applications.
Increase the productivity of developers
To increase developers’ productivity, extensibility, frameworks, and data enrichment are crucial for creating data-intensive applications, such as AI apps. Including features like support for REST APIs, GraphQL integration via Data API Builder, and Regular Expression enablement ensures that SQL will give developers the greatest possible experience. Furthermore, native JSON support makes it easier for developers to handle hierarchical data and schema that changes regularly, allowing for the development of more dynamic apps. SQL development is generally being improved to make it more user-friendly, performant, and extensible. The SQL Server engine’s security underpins all of its features, making it an AI platform that is genuinely enterprise-ready.
Top-notch performance and security
In terms of database security and performance, SQL Server 2025 leads the industry. Enhancing credential management, lowering potential vulnerabilities, and offering compliance and auditing features are all made possible via support for Microsoft Entra controlled identities. Outbound authentication support for MSI (Managed Service Identity) for SQL Server supported by Azure Arc is introduced in SQL Server 2025.
Additionally, it is bringing to SQL Server performance and availability improvements that have been thoroughly tested on Microsoft Azure SQL. With improved query optimization and query performance execution in the latest version, you may increase workload performance and decrease troubleshooting. The purpose of Optional Parameter Plan Optimization (OPPO) is to greatly minimize problematic parameter sniffing issues that may arise in workloads and to allow SQL Server to select the best execution plan based on runtime parameter values supplied by the customer.
Secondary replicas with persistent statistics mitigate possible performance decrease by preventing statistics from being lost during a restart or failover. The enhancements to batch mode processing and columnstore indexing further solidify SQL Server’s position as a mission-critical database for analytical workloads in terms of query execution.
Through Transaction ID (TID) Locking and Lock After Qualification (LAQ), optimized locking minimizes blocking for concurrent transactions and lowers lock memory consumption. Customers can improve concurrency, scalability, and uptime for SQL Server applications with this functionality.
Change event streaming for SQL Server offers command query responsibility segregation, real-time intelligence, and real-time application integration with event-driven architectures. New database engine capabilities will be added, enabling near real-time capture and publication of small changes to data and schema to a specified destination, like Azure Event Hubs and Kafka.
Azure Arc and Microsoft Fabric are linked
Designing, overseeing, and administering intricate ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) procedures to move operational data from SQL Server is necessary for integrating all of your data in conventional data warehouse and data lake scenarios. The inability of these conventional techniques to provide real-time data transfer leads to latency, which hinders the development of real-time analytics. In order to satisfy the demands of contemporary analytical workloads, Microsoft Fabric provides comprehensive, integrated, and AI-enhanced data analytics services.
The fully controlled, robust Mirrored SQL Server Database in Fabric procedure makes it easy to replicate SQL Server data to Microsoft OneLake in almost real-time. In order to facilitate analytics and insights on the unified Fabric data platform, mirroring will allow customers to continuously replicate data from SQL Server databases running on Azure virtual machines or outside of Azure, serving online transaction processing (OLTP) or operational store workloads directly into OneLake.
Azure is still an essential part of SQL Server. To help clients better manage, safeguard, and control their SQL estate at scale across on-premises and cloud, SQL Server 2025 will continue to offer cloud capabilities with Azure Arc. Customers can further improve their business continuity and expedite everyday activities with features like monitoring, automatic patching, automatic backups, and Best Practices Assessment. Additionally, Azure Arc makes SQL Server licensing easier by providing a pay-as-you-go option, giving its clients flexibility and license insight.
SQL Server 2025 release date
Microsoft hasn’t set a SQL Server 2025 release date. Based on current data, we can make some confident guesses:
- Private Preview: SQL Server 2025 is in private preview, so a small set of users can test and provide comments.
- Microsoft may provide a public preview in 2025 to let more people sample the new features.
- General Availability: SQL Server 2025’s final release date is unknown, but it will be in 2025.
