Microsoft Ignite announces SQL Server 2025 and SQL database on Fabric
Microsoft Ignite is happening in Chicago this week. Like every big Microsoft conference, there were rafts of announcements across the entire stack of products. Like any tech conference in 2024, there were many announcements related to artificial intelligence (AI), where seemingly every product is adding a Copilot experience.
Besides the AI news, there were two big announcements from Microsoft's data platform organization—the introduction of SQL Server 2025 and SQL database on Fabric.
Microsoft announced SQL Server 2025 for private preview availability—many administrators have been waiting for release, only slightly delayed from Microsoft's three-ish year cadence for versions of its flagship database product.
Microsoft is also adding support for calling external REST APIs into SQL Server. This functionality has been in Azure SQL Database for a couple of years; it helps with AI and common practices of ingesting data from APIs. One exciting aspect of the AI features is that AzureAI is not required—you can store your AI models on-premises and use them that way.
Microsoft also adds a feature to support using Azure Managed Identities for hybrid activities, such as reading from blob storage to taking cloud backups. This addition is a much-requested feature, as the previous incarnations of connections to Azure required less secure authentication options like shared access signatures or storage account access keys. Microsoft still needs to share the full details of this feature. Still, I expect it to work on Azure VMs and on-premises servers running Arc so the server or VM can have its own identity.
Some other SQL Server features include optimized locking, support for a native JSON datatype, and improvements in the operations of Always On Availability Groups.
SQL Server was not the only product with new announcements; the Fabric team introduced new features and additions to the supported object types for its ever-evolving CI/CD process. The big product introduction for Fabric was the SQL database on Fabric (yes, that is the proper casing), a database service within Fabric. It's the same Azure SQL Database you have known and loved, but now inside of Fabric, included in the price of your F SKU.
Most early use cases center around storing configuration data. Maybe some master data management, but Microsoft's long-term vision is for Fabric to be an organization's data hub, where applications write transactional data and land can be quickly ingested into analytical pipelines in a single service.
For many smaller organizations that don't have a ton of data volume, using SQL database on Fabric may be easier than trying to choose between a data lakehouse or a data warehouse in Fabric.
For data volumes of a terabyte or less, the database may also offer better performance. While the massively parallel engines that power those offerings excel at large data volumes, they bring much overhead that only pays off for small data.
Time will tell, but it's exciting to be a Microsoft data professional and partner.
Ignite always comes with many announcements and is a lot to absorb—while you learned about the two major data platform announcements, there are many other product announcements across Azure, Microsoft 365, and Windows. Stay tuned here for more information going forward!
Joey D'Antoni is Principal Cloud Architect at DesignMind. He is a Microsoft Data Platform MVP. Joey blogs about technology of all kinds at joeydantoni.com and writes a monthly column for Redmond Magazine.