Microsoft announces public preview of SQL Server 2025

Back in November 2024, Microsoft announced the private preview of SQL Server 2025, the successor to the popular SQL Server 2022. Targeting the current industry trend, SQL Server 2025 will allow developers to build AI applications using their data with improved security, performance, and availability. At Build 2025, Microsoft announced the public preview of SQL Server 2025.

SQL Server 2025 now has AI directly integrated into the database engine for improved search. Thanks to built-in vector search capabilities, developers can perform semantic searches over their data to find matches based on similarity, alongside full-text search and filtering. SQL Server 2025 also comes with improved AI model management through model definitions built into T-SQL to AI services, including Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, OpenAI, Ollama, and more.

Developers can access these models through REST APIs, and they are isolated from the SQL Server engine. SQL Server 2025 also supports DiskANN, text chunking, embedding generation, and integration with AI frameworks like LangChain, Semantic Kernel, and Entity Framework Core.

Apart from the AI capabilities, SQL Server 2025 also comes with significant developer improvements. This latest release will offer native JSON support, allowing developers to easily validate and manipulate their datasets with external data sources. Change Event Streaming will help developers consume transaction log changes as events directly from SQL Server to Microsoft Azure Event Hubs. Microsoft also announced the public preview of the new open-source Python driver for SQL Server, which is a fully open-source Python solution for connecting to SQL Server. Microsoft also announced the integration of the MSSQL Extension for Visual Studio Code with GitHub Copilot for better code suggestions.

SQL Server 2025 comes with several improvements to security, performance, and availability. For example, the new Optimized Locking reduces lock memory consumption and minimizes blocking for concurrent transactions through Transaction ID (TID) Locking and Lock After Qualification (LAQ).

Finally, Microsoft is announcing a new SQL Server 2025 Standard Developer edition in addition to the existing Developer edition, which has all Enterprise features. This will allow developers to build and test against the Standard edition without any licensing fees.

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