Azure SQL Dev Corner
Voices from the Azure SQL PM Team, focusing on development and developers
Latest posts
The Two Hybrid Searches in Microsoft SQL
Hybrid search is usually described as combining keyword search with vector search. Microsoft SQL does that, for sure, but we do quite a bit more right out of the box. SQL dynamically evaluates queries and switches between kNN and ANN vector search based on cost and selectivity. These two types of hybrid search, work together, ensuring your semantic queries return the best possible results to your apps and agents. Text search In 1998, Microsoft Research Cambridge welcomed Stephen Robertson, one of the principal architects of BM25, or Best Matching 25, the relevance-ranking algorithm that became foundational to m...
Beyond Vector Indexes: Azure SQL Brings Optimizer Intelligence to Vector Search
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 critical, but production AI retrieval rarely consists of vector similarity alone. Equally important is what happens when vector search becomes part of a real application workload, one that includes filters, joins, security policies, ranking logic, and live operational d...
Your best friend: BlockOnPossibleDataLoss=True
BlockOnPossibleDataLoss can frustrate developers, but it's one of the most important safeguards in database deployment. Here's how to keep your local development loop fast while protecting the data that matters.
Build Locally, Ship to Cloud for $0: Azure SQL for Modern App Developers
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 development fast, intelligent, and completely free. By combining the Azure SQL Database container for local offline development, AI Agent Skills to automate your ORM and data layer, and the Azure SQL Database Free Tier, you can build locally and ship to production in minutes fo...
Refactor your database with SQL projects in VS Code
SQL database projects are a fundamental tool for keeping your database in source control, tracking changes and collaborating on quickly evolving database needs. Not to be forgotten, their superpower is being able to dynamically generate deployment scripts that match the declared state and the exact environment you're deploying to. SQL project development becomes more challenging when a database needs serious changes, where the requirements of the system have evolved to the point of having to rename tables and move objects between schemas. In plain T-SQL, we can rename a table or column without having to co...
Build locally, ship to Azure: meet Azure SQL Database container
Big news: The Azure SQL Database container is here, in private preview. It's the Azure SQL Database engine, on your laptop, in a container. Build against the exact engine you run in the cloud. Ship the same code to Azure. Change one line, the connection string, and you're in production. Free for local dev and CI. No subscription. No credit card. No catch. Run it yourself, or hand it to an AI agent and watch it go. The inner-loop problem If you build apps on a cloud database, you know the friction. To develop and test locally, you either point your app at a shared cloud instance, with slow round trips, noisy ne...
T-SQL Hygiene: Introducing the Covering Index
Often in applications, we write database queries. And often, the same query is executed again and again. To make queries against large tables faster, we can add an index. This is a general improvement for anyone accessing the table. However, there is a specially designed index called a covering index that can make queries against large tables particularly faster for one specific query. We call it covering because it covers all the projections and predicates in that query. Which query? That is up to you, the developer, to identify. Look for queries that are either 1) very important to run fast or 2) extreme...
T-SQL Hygiene: What’s the Big Deal with SET NOCOUNT ON?
Learn why SET NOCOUNT ON improves stored procedure efficiency, reduces unnecessary messages, and matters to .NET developers.
MSSQL Extension for VS Code: Shortcuts Configuration, Enhanced Results Grid Experience, and More
The MSSQL extension for VS Code v1.44 continues to improve the SQL development experience with features that help you work faster and customize your workflow. In this release, we're introducing the Public Preview of Shortcuts Configuration and an Enhanced Results Grid experience. Together, these updates make it easier to personalize how you work with SQL and improve the performance and usability of query results directly inside Visual Studio Code. What's new in MSSQL extension for VS Code v1.44 Here's a summary of the key features in this release: Shortcuts Configuration (Preview) The new Shor...