Showing archive results for 2026

The MSSQL extension for VS Code v1.43 expands what’s possible inside Visual Studio Code with the General Availability of Schema Designer with GitHub Copilot, Data API builder, and SQL Notebooks. We’re also introducing the Public Preview of Azure SQL Database provisioning, giving developers a guided way to create Azure SQL databases directly fro...

If you work with Microsoft SQL regularly, the AI conversation right now probably feels a little exhausting. Every week brings a new platform, a new pattern, a new opinion about how you’re “supposed” to build AI apps. Most of it assumes you’ll start over. You don’t have to. We’re running SQL AI App in a Day workshops with Microsoft partners ar...

At a glance — Native regular expression (regex) functions in T-SQL now accept and inputs of up to 2 MB across all seven regex functions, including the two table-valued functions ( and ). This capability ships in SQL Server 2025 CU5 and is already available in Azure SQL Database, SQL Database in Fabric and Azure SQL Managed Instance configured wit...

You’ve probably experienced both of these, perhaps at the same time. First, that desire to let an agent get at your data. It’s driven by simplification and better experiences for the user and for you: fewer screens, fewer queries, fewer reports, and less code overall. Second, and perhaps more importantly, that unrelenting reluctance and reticenc...

Artificial Intelligence is evolving rapidly. What began as simple prompt-and-response systems is now transforming into fully autonomous, agentic AI architectures capable of reasoning, orchestrating tools, interacting with enterprise data, and invoking external systems dynamically. While these capabilities unlock enormous business potential, they al...

We are excited to announce the General Availability (GA) of AI_GENERATE_EMBEDDINGS and CREATE EXTERNAL MODEL in Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance. These two T-SQL features — CREATE EXTERNAL MODEL and AI_GENERATE_EMBEDDINGS — work together as a single, integrated pipeline for generating vector embeddings directly from T-SQL. No da...

Run SQL MCP Server on Azure App Service without containers. This walkthrough uses Data API builder to configure authentication, expose MCP, REST, and GraphQL endpoints, and deploy as code.

Azure Data Studio (ADS) retired on February 6, 2025, and support ended on February 28, 2026. The recommended path forward is Visual Studio Code with the MSSQL extension. If you used ADS daily, this guide gets you productive quickly in VS Code. The focus is on importing your existing setup, restoring familiar shortcuts like F5, and getting SQL Datab...

The Agent-Ready Database: Security, Backup, and MCP Part 4 of 4 – The Multi-Model Database Series This is the final post in a four-part series on multi-model databases in SQL Server 2025 and Azure SQL - exploring how the optimizer, storage engine, and security layer treat each data model as a first-class citizen under one roof. In Part 1: The ...

SQL MCP Server gives enterprises a secure, feature-rich way to enable agents to access data. This is accomplished without exposing the schema, risking consistency, or relying on fragile natural language parsing. SQL MCP Server is a feature of Data API builder, so deployments have a proven entity abstraction system, RBAC security at the API layer wi...