SQL Server 2025 released

SQL Server 2025 is out - congrats to everyone involved at Microsoft.

To paraphrase Ron Soukup; "shipping is a feature, and you have shipped!"

This release comes with some significant new features and refinements. Definitely my favourite release for many years.

Here's a list of a few personal favourite features, from a packed list:

• Standard Edition resources have been boosted to 32 CPUs and 256 GB RAM.
• Resource Governor is now available in Standard Edition.
• Call REST APIs directly from within TSQL code.
• Optimized Locking can reduce blocking and increase throughput in some scenarios.
• JSON data can now be stored, indexed and searched as a native type rather than nvarchar(max).
• Faster backups with support for ZSTD algorithm.
• Remove In-Memory OLTP from databases.

Again, congrats to the Microsoft SQL Server team on this milestone, and here is the announcement.

SQL Server 2025 Standard Edition resource limits have been increased to 32 CPUs and 256 GB RAM, with no increase in license cost. Standard Edition was restricted to 24 CPUs and 128 GB of RAM for a number of versions so this upgrade will be very helpful for customers who want to extend their time on Standard Edition, or downgrade from Enterprise Edition.

Resource Governor has also been added to SQL Server 2025 Standard Edition, bringing a previously Enterprise Edition only feature into Standard Edition. No longer will we have to tell customers that we can configure resource pools if only we had Enterprise Edition!

The new SQL Server 2025 Standard Developer Edition also allows testing on an equivalent edition for customers who run Standard Edition in production, which will help avoid releasing Enterprise Features to Standard Edition in prod.

Calling API endpoints directly from within TSQL code opens new options for integrating SQL Server databases with external data sources, without having to write custom .Net libraries, invoke 1990s era OLE automation, or develop client / server logic.

Simply call the system stored procedure sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint to access an AI service, import market data, send a SignalR message, or do almost anything with a REST API endpoint.

This feature is also a likely target for malicious actors, so securing access to this feature, and controlling out-bound https traffic are also important.

Optimized locking improves performance of database updates by acquiring fewer locks, and only locking resources actually being updated which differs from locking behaviour in previous SQL Server versions which can lock rows even when they are not being updated.

This behaviour of previous versions sometimes led to developers using UPDATE with NOLOCK syntax, a problem solved by Optimized Locking's Lock After Qualification feature.

Optimized Locking is enabled in Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance, but must be manually enabled in SQL Server 2025, along with Accelerated Database Recovery and Read Committed Snapshot Isolation.

Read more on Optimixed Locking here.

SQL Server launched its first JSON features back in SQL Server 2016. SQL Server 2025 builds upon its JSON capabilities with the following new features:

• A native JSON data type, which can be used for storing JSON data within a table column rather than the nvarchar(max) type.
• JSON indexes can be created on columns or paths.
• The new JSON_CONTAINS function, to search JSON data efficiently for a value.

These new JSON features couple nicely with the REST API integration described above, allowing greatly improved integrations with SQL Server 2025 than earlier versions.

Faster backups can be exciting for DBAs, and for platform / system administrators who need to manage operational windows where backups are assigned timeframes before / after which other processes can run.

SQL Server 2025 introduces the ZSTD compression algorithm, which offers the potential for faster backups with LOW, MEDIUM, and HIGH level options to control the level of compression and time taken by backups.

Testing is important with this feature, so try out each of the compression levels and compare them to your existing backup times. You might save some backup time, and get some extra sleep!

Read more on SQL Server 2025's faster backups here.

We are big fans of In-Memory OLTP at MyDBA, with some wonderful outcomes in high performance systems.

One sticking point, however, has been the inability to remove In-Memory OLTP from a database after it has been added. This has forced us to dramatically drop databases repeatedly in test enviornments, just to escape another of In-Memory's challenges when system start-up can be slowed down for databases with In-Memory OLTP enabled.

Being able to remove In-Memory OLTP from a database is a small but helpful step in bringing this technology forward, and we are very pleased to see Microsoft still improving In-Memory OLTP.

Read more on removing In-Memory OLTP from a database here.

SQL Server 2025 is packed with features, the above is just a small selection from a much longer list.

Here are a few other features you may find interesting:

• AI built-in is Microsoft's leading feature with SQL Server 2025.
• Columnstore indexes are improved, with ordering, shrink and online rebuild features.
• Availability Groups have also received a number of improvements.
• Regular Expression functions are now available directly in TSQL. We haven't tried them, good luck!
• Change Event Streaming offers a more light weight alternative to other change capture methods such as Change Data Capture. It is in preview mode in SQL Server 2025, which means it is subject to change, so take care out there!