At the Ignite conference today, Microsoft made a series of announcements about Azure databases. It announced a brand-new Azure database called HorizonDB, which is a fully managed PostgreSQL database service. Along with that, Microsoft also announced the general availability of SQL Server 2025, Fabric databases, and DocumentDB.
In late 2024, Microsoft first unveiled the private preview of SQL Server 2025 with improved security, performance, and availability. Later at Build 2025, Microsoft announced the public preview of SQL Server 2025. Today, Microsoft introduced the general availability of SQL Server 2025. SQL Server 2025 comes with several built-in AI and developer-first improvements, including the following:
- Native vector data type support (including half-precision floats) for embedding workloads.
- Approximate vector indexes (e.g., DiskANN-based) for fast similarity search directly in the engine.
- Copilot in SQL Server Management Studio, a natural-language style query assistance built into the management interface.
- Enhanced JSON support: native JSON data type, JSON indexing, array/object operations in T-SQL.
- Improved AI model management through model definitions built into T-SQL to AI services, including Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, OpenAI, Ollama, and more.
Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB in vCore is a fully managed MongoDB-compatible database service built on the open-source DocumentDB standard for building modern applications. Microsoft is now rebranding the service as Azure DocumentDB, and it is now generally available.
Azure DocumentDB offers AI-ready vector and hybrid search, instant autoscale, and independent compute and storage scaling. Microsoft offers up to 99.995% service-level agreement (SLA) availability and free 35-day backups.
Microsoft today also announced the general availability of Fabric databases. SQL database and Cosmos DB are now available inside Microsoft Fabric as a unified SaaS experience, enabling real-time analytics, transactional processing, and AI workloads to run simultaneously in one governed environment.
For customers who want to maintain operational databases where they are, they can use the database mirroring feature in Fabric, which is generally available now with support for SQL Server, Azure Cosmos DB, and Azure Database for PostgreSQL.