At Build 2025, SQL Server 2025 officially entered public preview. As one of the world’s most popular databases, this release continues a decades-long history of innovation with features made for developers, AI, analytics, and cloud connectivity. SQL Server 2025 is the most significant release for SQL developers in the last decade and will help streamline application development and greatly reduce complexity. With built-in vector support, you can now boost search intelligence by combining semantic search alongside full text search and filtering. This will allow you to run the generative AI models of your choice with your own data. SQL Server 2025 enables zero-ETL (extract, transform, and load), real-time analytics through mirroring in Microsoft Fabric and provides cloud agility through Azure Arc.
As we look back at the creation of SQL Server 2025, we want to extend our deepest gratitude to the community leaders, MVPs, partners, and Microsoft engineers who have shared their insights, expertise, and enthusiasm about this exciting release. Their passion for SQL Server and commitment to knowledge-sharing continue to inspire us.
In the resources below we showcase the expertise of our community as well as Microsoft, with blogs and videos that will help you make the most of everything SQL Server 2025 has to offer. These resources dive into key innovations that set SQL Server 2025 apart, including best-in-class security, built-in AI, developer enhancements, and Fabric mirroring.
We’ll get started with resources that provide an overview of key SQL Server innovations and then dive into each of the core pillars of best-in-class performance and security, AI-built in, made for developer, and cloud agility through Azure.
SQL Server remains as the most secure database in the last decade, with best-in-class performance and availability. This latest release harnesses the latest innovation from Microsoft Entra and brings over 50 enhancements to the database engine.
“SQL Server 2025 is an important release, delivering significant improvements in performance, reliability, security, and the developer experience for our trading platform.”
Learn how to accelerate AI apps closer to your own data using extensible tools with built-in vector capabilities.
“We are excited about the AI features in SQL Server 2025, especially the potential for text processing that can benefit companies of all sizes. AI brings new ways to process and extract insights from data, and with SQL Server being the core repository for many businesses, native AI features like embeddings, REST API support, and vector indexes are game changers.”
SQL Server 2025 is the most significant release for SQL developers in the last decade. With features including native JSON support, built-in REST APIs and RegEx enablement, change event streaming plus a new Standard Developer edition and new SSMS release, SQL Server 2025 helps streamline application development and greatly reduce code complexity.
“Our initial tests have shown great results with fuzzy string matching and regex, significantly reducing the need for external coding to clean data. This improvement in development time and data quality stability is a huge benefit for our end-users. Additionally, we are exploring vector indexes, which have the potential to be a game-changer for our data management.”
Powered by Azure, SQL Server 2025 enables real-time analytics with Fabric database mirroring and brings seamless cloud agility to any environment through Azure Arc.
“Change Event Streaming and Fabric Mirroring for SQL Server 2025 help MSC to build the bridge to bring our operational data into Microsoft Fabric.”
An AI-ready enterprise database with best-in-class security, performance and availability.
Azure-enabled with continued performance and security innovation, SQL Server 2022 provides a modern data platform to transform your business.
