This week we have announced SQL Server 2025 now available in private preview. SQL Server 2025 is an Enterprise AI-ready database from ground to cloud. SQL Server 2025 has AI built-in, powered by an industry proven engine with security, performance, and availability. SQL Server continues to be an integrated database connected to Microsoft Fabric for near-real time analytics and Azure Arc providing a true hybrid data platform.

Along with the announcement of SQL database in Fabric (http://aka.ms/announcingsqlfabric), Microsoft SQL provides a unique deployment experience from ground to cloud to fabric but using the same engine, allowing developers to build AI applications in a similar fashion and deploy anywhere.

Overall, SQL Server 2025 is a new release packed with innovations for AI, analytics, and development, along with core engine features for security, performance, and availability. Let's look more at the details.

AI Built-in

SQL Server 2025 will allow developers to execute vector searches and build RAG patterns co-located with their data inside the database engine. This provides a powerful concept to bring AI to your data.

SQL Server 2025 comes withe following capabilities for AI applications:

• A native vector type and vector index (DiskANN)
• Model management through model definitions built into T-SQL to popular AI services ground to cloud such as Azure OpenAI, OpenAI, Ollama, and KServe. Administrators have complete control to set permissions on who can create these definitions. Models are all accessed through REST APIs allowing you to deploy your models anywhere you want. In addition, SQL Server 2025 will support the system procedure sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint to access any model interface you need through REST.
• Embedding generation and text chunking built into T-SQL.
• Vector searches through vector distance and vector index search functions built into T-SQL. Combine this with the powerful filtering of SQL Server to execute hybrid searches.
• Integration with Entity Framework Core and the popular AI frameworks LangChain and Semantic Kernel.

Developers have everything they need for AI. Administrators can use the powerful security model of SQL Server to grant only the permissions that are required. All of these AI features are consistent for SQL from ground to cloud to fabric.

Vector support exists already in Azure SQL today. Learn more at https://devblogs.microsoft.com/azure-sql/exciting-announcement-public-preview-of-native-vector-support-in-azure-sql-database.

Integrated with Fabric

Like Azure SQL, SQL Server 2025 will support Fabric mirroring. Fabric mirroring gives you near real-time analytics using a zero ETL experience and allows you to offload your analytic workloads to Fabric.

To get a feel for how mirroring works, you can read more about Fabric mirroring for Azure SQL at Microsoft Fabric mirrored databases from Azure SQL Database (Preview) - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn

Develop modern database applications

We know developers need the right tools and interfaces for modern data applications. SQL Server 2025 includes these new features:

• JSON type, JSON index, and new JSON T-SQL functions.
• GraphQL support through Data API Builder (DAB).
• Regular expression support in T-SQL and other new T-SQL functions
• REST API support in the engine through sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint.
• Change feeds from the transaction log consumed by applications that support Azure Event Hub and Kafka.

Secure by default

Microsoft supported Microsoft Entra authentication using Azure Arc in SQL Server 2022. SQL Server 2025 adds managed identity support for both inbound connections and outbound operations such as BACKUP to Azure Storage.

Mission critical engine

SQL Server 2025 enhances availability for applications through optimized locking. To see how optimized locking works in Azure SQL see https://learn.microsoft.com/sql/relational-databases/performance/optimized-locking

In addition, SQL Server 2025 brings enhancements to performance for applications with no code changes required through batch mode and columnstore improvements, enhancements for query processing, and innovations for accelerated query execution.

SQL Server 2025 also includes enhancements to the reliability of Always On Availability Group failover along with new diagnostics for support.

Hybrid, Assisted, and Optimized

SQL Server 2025 is also connected with Azure Arc to enhance security and the hybrid experience, is assisted by Copilots in SSMS, will continue to invest in benchmarks, is optimized for the latest in hardware, and can be deployed where you need it: clouds, Windows, Linux, containers, and Kubernetes.

Get Started

The journey is just starting for SQL Server 2025. Sign-up for the private preview at https://aka.ms/sqleapsignup.

We look forward to telling you even more about SQL Server 2025 in calendar year 2025!

Bob Ward

Microsoft