The increasing adoption of AI technologies is presenting new challenges for our customers’ data estate and applications. Most organizations expect to deploy AI workloads across a hybrid mix of cloud, edge, and dedicated infrastructure, with privacy and security being more important than ever.
Microsoft SQL Server 2025, now in preview, is an enterprise AI-ready database from ground to cloud that tackles these challenges by bringing AI to customers’ data. This release continues SQL Server’s three decades of innovation in performance and security, adding new AI capabilities. With Microsoft Fabric integration, customers can bring their data into the next generation of data analytics. The release supports hybrid environments across clouds, on-premises datacenters, and edge, leveraging Microsoft Azure innovation for customers’ databases.
Over the years, SQL Server has transcended well beyond a traditional relational database. With the latest release of SQL Server, we’re enabling customers to build AI applications deeply integrated with the SQL engine. SQL Server 2025 is transforming into a vector database in its own right, using the built-in filtering capabilities along with a vector search, with great performance and is easily consumable by developers using T-SQL.
AI built-in
This new version has AI built-in, simplifying AI application development and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) patterns with secure, performant, and easy-to-use vector support, leveraging familiar T-SQL syntax. With this new capability, you can combine vectors with your SQL data for a hybrid AI vector search.
Build AI applications with your enterprise database
SQL Server 2025 is an enterprise-ready vector database with built-in security and compliance, bringing enterprise AI to your data. It features a native vector store and index powered by DiskANN, a vector search technology using disk storage to efficiently find similar data points in large datasets. These databases efficiently support chunking and enable accurate data retrieval through semantic searching. In this latest SQL Server version, flexible AI model management within the engine using Representational State Transfer (REST) interfaces allows you to use AI models from ground to cloud.
In addition, whether customers are working on data preprocessing, model training, or RAG patterns, extensible, low-code tools offer flexible model interfaces within the SQL engine, supported by T-SQL and external REST endpoints. These tools enhance developers’ ability to create various AI applications through seamless integration with popular AI frameworks like LangChain, Semantic Kernel, and Entity Framework Core.
Boost developer productivity
When building data-intensive applications such as AI applications, it’s critical to focus on extensibility, frameworks, and data enrichment to enhance developers’ productivity. We ensure SQL will provide a best-in-class experience for developers by incorporating features such as REST API support, GraphQL integration through Data API Builder, and Regular Expression enablement. Additionally, native JSON support enables developers to more effectively deal with frequently changing schema and hierarchical data, facilitating the creation of more dynamic applications. Overall, we’re enhancing SQL development to be more extensible, performant, and user-friendly. All functionalities are underpinned by the security provided by the SQL Server engine, making it a truly enterprise-ready platform for AI.
Best-in-class security and performance
SQL Server 2025 is an industry leader in database security and performance. Support for Microsoft Entra managed identities improves credential management, reduces potential vulnerabilities, and provides compliance and auditing capabilities. SQL Server 2025 introduces outbound authentication support for MSI (Managed Service Identity) for SQL Server enabled by Azure Arc.
We’re also introducing performance and availability enhancements, extensively battle-tested on Microsoft Azure SQL, to SQL Server. In the new version you can boost workload performance and reduce troubleshooting with enhanced query optimization and query performance execution. Optional Parameter Plan Optimization (OPPO) is designed to enable SQL Server to choose the optimal execution plan based on customer-provided runtime parameter values and to significantly reduce bad parameter sniffing problems that can exist in workloads. Persisted statistics on secondary replicas prevent the loss of statistics during a restart or failover, thereby avoiding potential performance degradation. Regarding query execution, the improvements in batch mode processing and columnstore indexing further establish SQL Server as a mission-critical database for analytical workloads.
Optimized locking reduces lock memory consumption and minimizes blocking for concurrent transactions through Transaction ID (TID) Locking and Lock After Qualification (LAQ). This capability enables customers to increase uptime and enhance concurrency and scale for SQL Server applications.
Change event streaming for SQL Server brings real-time application integration with event driven architectures, command query responsibility segregation, and real-time intelligence. This will add new database engine capabilities to capture and publish incremental changes to data and schema to a provided destination such as Azure Event Hubs and Kafka in near real-time.
Microsoft Fabric and Azure Arc connected
In traditional data warehouse and data lake scenarios, integrating all your data involves designing, monitoring, and managing complex ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) processes to transfer operational data from SQL Server. These traditional methods do not support real-time data transfer, resulting in latency that prevents the creation of real-time analytics. Microsoft Fabric offers comprehensive, integrated, and AI-enhanced data analytics services designed to meet modern requirements of analytical workloads. Mirrored SQL Server Database in Fabric is a fully managed, resilient process that simplifies SQL Server data replication to Microsoft OneLake in near real-time. Mirroring will enable 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 in order to facilitate analytics and insights on the unified Fabric data platform.
Azure continues to be a critical component of SQL Server. With Azure Arc, SQL Server 2025 will continue to offer cloud capabilities to enable customers better manage, secure, and govern their SQL estate at scale across on-premises and cloud. Capabilities like automatic patching, automatic backups, monitoring, and Best Practices Assessment offer customers more ways to streamline routine tasks and further enhance their business continuity. In addition, Azure Arc simplifies SQL Server licensing by offering a pay-as-you-go option, bringing flexibility and licensing visibility to our customers.
Sign up for the preview today
We’re currently onboarding customers and partners to SQL Server 2025 preview, in advance of general availability in the coming year.
Register today to apply for the SQL Server 2025 Community Technology Preview (CTP)1 and stay informed about SQL Server 2025 updates.
Microsoft just announced the upcoming release of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 21 Preview 1. This release integrates Microsoft Copilot capabilities into SSMS. The Copilot experience streamlines SQL development by offering real-time suggestions, code completions, and best practice recommendations. If you would like to take part and have an early hands-on experience with this new capability, please use this link to indicate your interest.
1Some of the new capabilities covered in this blog may not be available in the first CTP version.
Asad Khan is the Vice President of SQL Products and Services. He leads all engineering and product management for SQL Server and all Azure SQL.