Showing archive results for 2026

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...

Vectors, Analytics, and the End of ETL Part 3 of 4 - The Multi-model Database Series In Part 1: The Polyglot Tax we laid out the fraud detection scenario: a transaction comes in, and before you approve or deny it you need five checks. Order history (relational). Device fingerprint (JSON). Connections to fraud rings (graph). Transactions that lo...

SQL code analysis has been part of the SSDT workflow for a long time. Before deploying a schema change, you could run a set of static analysis rules against your project to catch potential issues, things like missing primary keys, deprecated syntax, or objects that could break under certain compatibility levels. It was one of those SSDT features th...

Making schema changes often means jumping between tools. You write code in VS Code, then switch to a separate tool to deploy your changes : exporting a script, running it manually, or copy-pasting into a query editor. Either way, it pulls you out of your flow. With the latest updates to SQL Database Projects in VS Code, that context switching is n...

Remember when we announced the Public Preview of DiskANN vector indexes back in November and mentioned that once you created the index, your table became read‑only? Yeah… about that... 😅 We shipped early because the demand for Vector search in SQL was overwhelming. We knew the constraints weren’t ideal, but we also knew the fastest way to get this ...

The MSSQL extension for VS Code v1.41 continues to evolve, delivering features that make SQL development more integrated, more powerful, and more developer-friendly. In this release, we're introducing the Public Preview of Schema Designer with GitHub Copilot, Data API builder, and SQL Notebooks, along with the General Availability of Data-tier ...