Showing category results for AI

Bob Ward and I recently released a series of videos, read more in the original blog post or go directly to the series on YouTube. The Azure SQL Database Foundations series are four videos that take you from your first Hyperscale database to AI features running against your own operational data. We also included how to assess and migrate (with AI...

If you’ve been building local prototypes, internal tools, web backends, or lightweight services on SQL Server Express, you know the routine: it’s free, familiar, and gets the job done – until you hit hardware limits or spend weekends manual backup scripts and handling OS patches. Learn how to upgrade from SQL Server Express to Azure SQL Database fr...

Why production AI retrieval depends on more than vector index performance.  It's easy to think of AI retrieval as a vector search problem. For many developers, the first conversation starts with vector index benchmarks: How many queries per second can it handle? What's the latency? What's the recall? How well does it scale? Those metrics are ...

As app developers, our primary focus is building great user experiences, designing APIs, and shipping features quickly. What we don't want is database friction—wasting hours configuring local DB instances, writing verbose migration scripts by hand, or worrying about unexpected cloud bills while prototyping. Today, we are making database developm...

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...

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...

When developers hear "cloud" and "AI," their first thought is often about cost. "How much will this cost me to learn? Can I build something meaningful without racking up a surprise bill?"   Budget Bytes is a new series is designed to inspire developers to build affordable, production-quality AI applications on Azure with a budget of $25 or...

At the start of this year, we released a new set of T-SQL AI features for embedding your relational data for AI applications. Today, we have brought those features to Azure SQL and SQL database in Microsoft Fabric. This post will help you get started using the new AI functions of Azure SQL. Prerequisites Set up your env...

We’re excited to announce major improvements to DiskANN in SQL Server 2025 RC1, making vector search faster, more scalable, and more storage-efficient than ever before. ⚡ Significantly Faster Index Builds Building DiskANN indexes is now considerably faster, thanks to optimizations that better utilize all available CPU cores and improve the ef...

With the release of SQL Server 2025 RC0, we have enabled the ability to use a local ONNX model on the server for embeddings. This allows you to use these models without having any network traffic leaving the local environment. Getting Started This example guides you through setting up SQL Server 2025 on Windows with an ONNX runtime to enabl...