SQL Server

by
Andrew Snodgrass

by
Andrew Snodgrass

Andrew analyzes and writes about Microsoft's data management, business intelligence, and machine learning solutions, as well as aspects of licensing... more

SQL Server is a server-based product that provides database management, integration, reporting, business intelligence, and machine learning components. All components run on Windows and Windows Server, with database and integration services components running on various Linux platforms. Each version is offered in several editions, with Standard and Enterprise being those used by most enterprises.

Product: SQL Server

Licensing: SQL Server

Near-Term Updates and Roadmap (2025–2027)

SQL Server 2025 reversed the direction of its predecessor. Where the 2022 release spent its budget connecting the product to Azure, this one put most of it back into the engine—locking, tempdb governance, availability groups, encryption—and added a native vector type and AI functions inside Transact-SQL so that retrieval can be built without sending data outside the database. Standard edition’s capacity ceilings rose at the same time, changing the edition calculation for many deployments.

The counterweight is that the 2025 version isn’t finished. Approximate vector indexing and search—the other half of the AI story—shipped as an opt-in preview and was still a preview 10 months later, as were change event streaming and fuzzy matching. Microsoft is again completing the product through cumulative updates rather than at general availability (GA). Additionally, the non-database components are being slowly eroded, and new encryption features break existing linked servers, replication, and log shipping configurations.