Azure SQL Devs’ Corner
Voices from the Azure SQL PM Team, focusing on development and developers
Featured posts
Announcing General Availability of Native Vector Type & Functions in Azure SQL
We are happy to announce that Native vector support in Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance is moving to General Availability this summer. Deploym...
Latest posts
Build an AI Agentic RAG search application with React, SQL Azure and Azure Static Web Apps
Introduction Leveraging OpenAI for semantic searches on structured databases like Azure SQL enhances search accuracy and context-awareness, providing more relevant and insightful results. This example showcases the use of Azure SQL for storing and searching data with AI. By implementing the RAG pattern with Azure SQL, the sample efficiently searches for the most relevant code and comprehensive end-to-end examples based on user queries. The AI then generates results that include the most pertinent documents along with explanations of their relevance. The final result is a web application, mobile friendl...
Data API builder 1.6: Advanced Behaviors with Special HTTP Headers
Data API builder (DAB) provides REST and GraphQL endpoints over SQL Server, Azure Cosmos DB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and SQL Data Warehouse. REST endpoints support several HTTP headers that let you control how requests behave. These headers give you precision over updates, caching, and discovering new resources. If-Match By default, DAB treats PUT and PATCH as upserts: update if the row exists, insert if not. Sometimes you need stricter semantics. If-Match provides update-only behavior. If-Match in DAB only supports *. Any other value is rejected. Example request that only updates if the row exists: ...
Data API builder 1.6: Flexible Logging for Every Developer
Previously, developers were limited to the default log levels and filters hardcoded into DAB. With release 1.6, you can now configure filters and levels for logs emitted by the engine. This release also adds new sinks. In addition to Application Insights and OpenTelemetry publishing, Data API builder now supports both file and Azure Log Analytics as targets. Rich, configurable logging wherever you need it. File sink (⭐ new!) Until now, DAB developers were mostly limited to console logs in the container. With release 1.6, you can sink logs to local files in a container folder to systematically debug and ob...
Using the new SqlVector type with EF Core and Dapper
Azure SQL vector support has been generally available for a few months now, and the ecosystem is quickly evolving to make working with vectors in your applications as seamless and efficient as possible. With the release of Microsoft.Data.SqlClient 6.1, developers can now take advantage of binary transport for vector data via the new class. This significantly improves performance when moving vectors between your application and the database, laying the groundwork for optimized vector handling in popular .NET libraries like: Here’s how you can start using in each of these libraries: EF Core 9...
SQL Server 2025 RC1: faster DiskANN and FP16 support
We’re excited to announce major improvements to DiskANN in SQL Server 2025 RC1, making vector search faster, more scalable, and more storage-efficient than ever before. ⚡ Significantly Faster Index Builds Building DiskANN indexes is now considerably faster, thanks to optimizations that better utilize all available CPU cores and improve the efficiency of vector space traversal. This means quicker index creation and faster time-to-results for your AI-powered applications. 🧠 Improved Scalability Across Processors SQL Server 2025 RC1 brings enhanced scalability to DiskANN, allowing it to scale more effici...
MSSQL Extension for VS Code: Fabric Integration and GitHub Copilot Slash Commands (Public Preview)
The MSSQL Extension for VS Code continues to evolve, delivering features that make SQL development more integrated, more consistent, and more developer-friendly. In version v1.36.0, we’re announcing the Public Preview of Fabric Connectivity (Browse), SQL Database in Fabric Provisioning, and GitHub Copilot Slash Commands — three capabilities that bring Microsoft Fabric and AI-powered assistance directly into your development workflow inside Visual Studio Code. What’s new in MSSQL extension for VS Code v1.36 This release introduces three major capabilities designed to streamline the SQL development experience: ...
AI-based T-SQL Refactoring: an automatic intelligent code optimization with Azure OpenAI
This article presents an AI-powered approach to automating SQL Server code analysis and refactoring. The system intelligently identifies inefficiencies and common T-SQL anti-patterns, applying best practices through a set of formalized coding rules, using prompt-driven instructions. It not only automatically rewrites problematic and inefficient code but also delivers contextual recommendations to improve quality, security, and maintainability. Designed to address real-world use cases, this methodology enables organizations to modernize and optimize their SQL workloads more efficiently, accelerating migrati...
Using SQL Server’s new AI features and Python to create a T-SQL assistant
I recently created a GitHub repository to share the T-SQL scripts I've accumulated over 10 years as a DBA. However, I've always struggled to find the right script when I need it. For years, I relied on simple shell commands like find or just my memory, which could take 10-30 minutes, if I was lucky enough to find it. But, we are in the AI age, so I created that simple web application where you type what you want, and it finds the best scripts for your needs. The solution was created using the following technologies: In this post, I will focus on SQL Server's role, exploring i...
Create embeddings in SQL Server 2025 RC0 with a local ONNX model on Windows
With the release of SQL Server 2025 RC0, we have enabled the ability to use a local ONNX model on the server for embeddings. This allows you to use these models without having any network traffic leaving the local environment. Getting Started This example guides you through setting up SQL Server 2025 on Windows with an ONNX runtime to enable local AI-powered text embedding generation. ONNX Runtime is an open-source inference engine that allows you to run machine learning models locally, making it ideal for integrating AI capabilities into SQL Server environments. Step 1: Enable developer preview ...