News and technical articles about Microsoft’s SQL Server
Bob Ward and I recently released a series of videos, read more in the original blog post or go directly to the series on YouTube. The Azure SQL Database Foundations series are four videos that take you from your first Hyperscale database to AI features running against your own operational data. We also included how to assess […]
New Azure SQL Foundations video series with GitHub samples Continue Reading
If you’ve been building local prototypes, internal tools, web backends, or lightweight services on SQL Server Express, you know the routine: it’s free, familiar, and gets the job done – until you hit hardware limits or spend weekends manual backup scripts and handling OS patches. Learn how to upgrade from SQL Server Express to Azure
Outgrowing SQL Server Express? Upgrade to Azure SQL Database Free Tier in 3 Steps Continue Reading
Writing and maintaining SQL is easier when you can eliminate repetitive steps and keep your scripts cleanly formatted. With the MSSQL extension for VS Code v1.45, we’re introducing the Public Preview of the SQL Formatter alongside the General Availability of Azure SQL Database Provisioning and Shortcuts Configuration. You can now apply consistent T-SQL formatting across
Hybrid search is usually described as combining keyword search with vector search. Microsoft SQL does that, for sure, but we do quite a bit more right out of the box. SQL dynamically evaluates queries and switches between kNN and ANN vector search based on cost and selectivity. These two types of hybrid search, work together,
Why production AI retrieval depends on more than vector index performance. It’s easy to think of AI retrieval as a vector search problem. For many developers, the first conversation starts with vector index benchmarks: How many queries per second can it handle? What’s the latency? What’s the recall? How well does it scale? Those metrics
Beyond Vector Indexes: Azure SQL Brings Optimizer Intelligence to Vector Search Continue Reading
Let’s start with an admission: developers all hate BlockOnPossibleDataLoss. It is the bane of a smooth development workflow, as significant schema changes can block deployment because of BlockOnPossibleDataLoss. Having said that, there’s more to life than the developer’s local loop. In fact, it’s arguable that the local loop, while important to you and me, is
Your best friend: BlockOnPossibleDataLoss=True Continue Reading
As app developers, our primary focus is building great user experiences, designing APIs, and shipping features quickly. What we don’t want is database friction—wasting hours configuring local DB instances, writing verbose migration scripts by hand, or worrying about unexpected cloud bills while prototyping. Today, we are making database development fast, intelligent, and completely free. By
Build Locally, Ship to Cloud for $0: Azure SQL for Modern App Developers Continue Reading
An application starts reporting intermittent timeouts when connecting to Azure SQL Database. Some requests succeed, others fail, and a test from a developer’s laptop works perfectly. The database appears online, no recent deployment seems related, and the natural reaction is to ask: Is Azure SQL unavailable? Is the firewall blocking the connection? Should we increase
Lessons Learned #551: Azure SQL Connection Timeouts: Three Things to Check Continue Reading
Executive Summary Organizations using Azure SQL Database Long-Term Retention (LTR) backup policies may encounter failures when attempting to disable backup immutability while also specifying an immutability mode in the same request. In the investigated scenario, the customer observed that the operation succeeded when performed through ARM templates but failed when executed through Terraform using AzAPI-based
Scenario Background During a recent investigation, a customer reported that SQL Authentication was failing when connecting to an Azure SQL Database geo-secondary replica. The customer confirmed the following: SQL Authentication worked successfully against the primary replica. The geo-secondary database was healthy and synchronized. The replicated database user existed in the secondary database. Microsoft Entra authentication
