Last week at Ignite, Microsoft announced the general availability of SQL Server 2025. This release is now available through licensing channels as well as for testing & evaluation purposes. Needless to say, as SQL Server Consultants ourselves, we’re very excited to see this on GA and get to work with clients implementing the latest features & improvements.
We’ve touched on what to expect in SQL Server 2025 in a previous post. Just to recap though the newest edition has a heavy focus on AI workloads. Not only is SQL Server 2025 ready to accept data formats ready for training AI LLMs but SQL Server Management Studio 22 now has Copilot built in ready to assist with writing SQL queries.
Of note with this release are a number of performance and reliability improvements in the database engine with optimised locking, tempDB space resource governance, and parameter plan optimisation. These should help improve instance performance and ensure day to day query response maintains consistency. Other improvements include SQL Server tooling for developers and enhanced support for Linux OSes.
Some licence changes for the standard edition are of particular note. Not only has the upper CPU and memory limit been raised but PowerBI Report Server and Resource Governor are now included with the licence. For Express edition there is also an uplift to 50GB of maximum database size. Express is useful to have around for a settings database for an application and lifting the limit means that it’s less of a concern that it will stop working after the limit is reached.
We’ve been hard at work building up some fresh test VMs incorporating the latest Windows Server 2025 plus SQL Server 2025 to ensure that we’re fully familiar with the latest versions of Microsoft’s Data Platform.
In terms of your organisation extended support for SQL Server 2017 will end in 2027. Whilst that might not be this coming year it always pays off to have future projects planned in advance.
Digital Incite and Matter Ltd are ready to help you with your upcoming application upgrades, SQL Server upgrades, query optimisation, and troubleshooting. Book your free 15 minute consultation call today and let’s get started.
