Microsoft announced a private preview of SQL Server 2025 back in November 2024, followed by a public preview in May 2025. Although development and testing of the tool are still ongoing, Microsoft has now announced some new features for the preview version.
For starters, Microsoft SQL Server 2025 on Linux Release Candidate 0 (RC0) now supports Ubuntu 24.04. This means that developers using the operating system can leverage the Enterprise Evaluation Edition of SQL Server 2025 to test their architectures in dev and test environments. Microsoft does not recommend doing the same in production environments, and encourages developers to use SQL Server 2022 on Ubuntu 22.04 or RHEL 9 in this case.
Microsoft has a quickstart installation guide for installing SQL Server 2025 preview in Ubuntu 24.04 here, and also has some guidance for deploying the software in the operating system running on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) here.
Next, it is important to note that SQL Server 2025 preview RC0 has Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.3 enabled by default. This should offer better security, and you can read more about it here.
SQL Server 2025 is an important release for many reasons. It packs native support for vector embeddings, which makes it ideal for AI workloads. The associated .NET and JDBC drivers have received the same support too, leading to up to 50x faster reads, 3.3x faster writes, and a 19x boost to bulk copy operations. In addition, it packs an AI-integrated database engine, native JSON support, Copilot in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), and a new Optimized Locking mechanism that reduces lock memory consumption and minimizes blocking for concurrent transactions through Transaction ID (TID) Locking and Lock After Qualification (LAQ). SQL Server 2025"s exact release date isn"t known yet, but you can expect it to land, well, in 2025.