Content area
Integration with Azure Arc allows centralized management of SQL Server instances across on-premises data centers, edge sites, and public cloud, letting administrators maintain consistent policies and update strategies across their entire estate. [...]party partners in storage and infrastructure are also rolling out integrations—examples include backup solutions that understand SQL Server 2025 metadata and storage platforms tuned for low-latency transactional workloads and large analytic datasets. About Microsoft Microsoft develops and supports SQL Server, one of the industry's leading relational database platforms, along with a broader ecosystem of Azure cloud services, developer tools, and analytics offerings designed to help organizations build and run data-centric applications at global scale.
Microsoft has launched SQL Server 2025, positioning the latest release of its flagship relational database as an "AI-ready enterprise database" that spans on-premises, cloud, and SaaS environments. Unveiled during Microsoft Ignite 2025, the release extends more than three decades of SQL Server development with built-in vector search, native JSON data handling, REST interfaces, and deep integration with Microsoft Fabric for near real-time analytics. Customers can download the new version for on-premises servers, deploy it on Azure SQL Virtual Machines, or consume its capabilities through related Azure SQL services.
A headline feature in SQL Server 2025 is integrated vector search inside the core database engine. Instead of offloading embeddings and similarity queries to a separate vector database, organizations can store embeddings alongside traditional tables and query them with familiar T- SQL syntax. This approach lets development teams build semantic search, recommendation systems, and RAG-style workloads directly on top of existing datasets without moving records into a separate system. Vector queries run under the same security, backup, and governance frameworks as the rest of the database, which simplifies compliance and reduces operational overhead.
Developers also gain new ways to work with semi-structured data. SQL Server 2025 introduces native JSON data types and operators that allow JSON documents to be stored and indexed more efficiently than in previous releases, which treated JSON as plain text. Combined with built-in REST APIs and enhanced regular expression support, the database can serve as both a traditional relational engine and a document store for microservices that expect JSON payloads. This flexibility is intended to reduce the need for parallel NoSQL systems and to simplify application architectures that rely on mixed relational and document-based datasets.
Operational enhancements focus on performance, resiliency, and hybrid deployment. SQL Server 2025 includes improved query optimization, refined failover behaviors, and new options for event streaming to downstream systems. With Fabric mirroring, transactional databases can mirror change events into Microsoft Fabric's OneLake data lake with minimal configuration, enabling near real-time analytics on operational data without duplicate ETL pipelines. Integration with Azure Arc allows centralized management of SQL Server instances across on-premises data centers, edge sites, and public cloud, letting administrators maintain consistent policies and update strategies across their entire estate.
Security and compliance are also front and center. The new release adds improvements in encryption, identity integration, and connectivity. Support for newer TLS versions and Entra ID–based authentication helps organizations modernize secure connections between application tiers and databases. Administrators can take advantage of enhanced auditing and classification tools to keep track of sensitive columns, such as personally identifiable information or financial data, and apply appropriate controls. High availability architectures can be implemented using Always On availability groups, with partner hardware vendors showcasing benchmark results for large-memory, high-core servers optimized for SQL Server 2025 workloads.
From a developer experience standpoint, Microsoft is pairing SQL Server 2025 with updated tooling. GitHub Copilot integrations, new drivers such as an updated Python connector, and learning paths through Microsoft Learn are aligned to help teams adopt new capabilities like vector search and JSON-native workloads without a steep learning curve. Third-party partners in storage and infrastructure are also rolling out integrations—examples include backup solutions that understand SQL Server 2025 metadata and storage platforms tuned for low-latency transactional workloads and large analytic datasets.
About Microsoft
Microsoft develops and supports SQL Server, one of the industry's leading relational database platforms, along with a broader ecosystem of Azure cloud services, developer tools, and analytics offerings designed to help organizations build and run data-centric applications at global scale.
For more information, visit www.microsoft.
Copyright Worldwide Videotex Jan 1, 2026