At the Ignite 2025 event, Microsoft unveiled significant updates to its Azure data services, introducing the general availability of SQL Server 2025 after an extensive preview period throughout 2024 and early 2025. This latest version emphasizes AI-powered enhancements and includes features like native vector data types and approximate vector indexing for accelerated similarity searches, as well as expanded JSON support.
One notable addition is the integration of Copilot directly within SQL Server Management Studio, which aids developers by providing natural-language query assistance. Alongside SQL Server, Microsoft also rebranded Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB as Azure DocumentDB, making it generally available. This service boasts AI-ready vector and hybrid search capabilities, autoscaling, and independent compute-storage scaling, all backed by a 99.995% SLA and complementary 35-day backups for added resilience.
Additionally, the company announced the general availability of Fabric databases, which allow both SQL Database and Cosmos DB to operate within Microsoft Fabric. This unified SaaS experience merges real-time analytics, transactional workloads, and AI tasks in a governed environment. Teams maintaining existing databases can also utilize Fabric’s database mirroring functionality, now broadly available and supporting SQL Server, Azure Cosmos DB, and Azure Database for PostgreSQL.
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