Microsoft Cloud Library

First, welcome to SQL! You’re going to like this. Upgrading from PostgreSQL is real work, and depending on your old PostgreSQL, that process can vary widely in complexity. You’re going to love the mindful and modern features of SQL. Take … Continue Reading

By Mark Gitau and Azin Heidarshenas In the MLPerf Inference v6.1 round, Azure demonstrated strong Deepseek-R1 performance on GB300 NVL72 and GB200 NVL72 platforms. Azure submitted GB200 results at 18-node (1-rack) and 72-node (4-rack) scale, and GB300 results at 18 … Continue Reading

I went looking for Azure SQL Database in a recent coding agent benchmark, honestly unsure whether Microsoft SQL would show up. Armature ran a study where real coding agent CLIs (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) were dropped into six synthetic-but-realistic repositories … Continue Reading

Application developers already know what happens when one method does everything: it becomes difficult to read, test, reason over, and safely change. We use patterns like decomposition, encapsulation, and explicit dependencies because they solve those problems. T-SQL does not give … Continue Reading

Schema change is inevitable. We do not get everything right the first time, and even when we do, the world around the database keeps changing. Requirements mature, products evolve, and assumptions that made sense years ago eventually stop matching reality … Continue Reading

In large scale AI clusters storage is responsible for delivering training data fast enough to keep accelerators busy and completing checkpoint saves and recoveries quickly enough to avoid costly stalls. MLPerf Storage is an industry-standard benchmark developed by MLCommons that … Continue Reading

When you need to move an entire database or move the objects in a database, bacpac and dacpac files often come up because of all of the tooling options to interact with them. Bacpac and dacpac files share some core … Continue Reading

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The 2002 release of the original .NET Framework shipped ADO.NET and System.Data.SqlClient, the driver for SQL Server that gave .NET applications a standard connection approach. Over the years, updates, enhancements, and patches solidified these BCL classes as an integral dependency … Continue Reading

Cohere Parse, a vision language model built for converting enterprise documents into structured, machine-readable data, is now available in the Microsoft Foundry model . Parse joins Cohere’s Embed and Rerank models in Foundry. What Parse does Cohere Parse takes complex, … Continue Reading

The next wave of AI applications won’t be defined by how quickly models answer questions. They’ll be defined by how much work they can complete. Whether resolving repository issues, navigating codebases, generating engineering designs, or executing multi-step enterprise workflows, developers … Continue Reading

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 … Continue Reading

Overview Microsoft HPC Pack is a Windows‑based high‑performance computing (HPC) scheduler that enables customers to deploy, manage, and operate HPC workloads in on‑premises and hybrid environments. Since its original release, HPC Pack has supported a range of Windows‑centric HPC scenarios, … Continue Reading

Building AI agents that can actually do things in your business systems—create records, update opportunities, trigger workflows—typically requires weeks of custom integration work. The Dataverse MCP Server changes that. In this tutorial, you’ll connect a Microsoft Foundry agent to your … Continue Reading

Part 2 of a series. Part 1, Grounding Copilot Studio Agents with Azure AI Search and Foundry IQ, defined five grounding patterns. This article gives you a reproducible way to compare them without mixing latency boundaries, billing units, or quality … Continue Reading

Building an agent shouldn’t require you to reinvent platform capabilities. With Microsoft Foundry, hosted agents inherit essential capabilities such as authentication, ingress management, A2A transport, and discovery endpoints, freeing developers to focus on business logic and user value. This article … Continue Reading

Imagine a customer support agent that answers invoice questions. During testing, everything works perfectly. But in production: The Finance API occasionally times out. The knowledge base contains outdated information. Tool calls fail during peak traffic. Token consumption rises unexpectedly. The … Continue Reading

Open models are driving a new wave of AI innovation, giving organizations more freedom to choose the models that best fit their requirements for performance, cost, latency, customization, and governance. As the open model ecosystem evolves rapidly, developers want access … Continue Reading

Across Microsoft, “hill climbing” has become shorthand for how real AI progress happens: not in one dramatic leap, but through a disciplined loop. Microsoft AI defines the hill climb as an organization that continuously improves, cycle after cycle, through more compute, better … Continue Reading

Use ACS to enforce Scope, Anchored Decisions, Flow Integrity, and Escalation while the agent runs, then prove the controls without model variance. A help desk agent receives two reports that sound almost identical: “I cannot sign in.” In the first … 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 … 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 … Continue Reading

The AI agent has moved from pilot project to production faster than most security programs were built to handle. Every AI agent you deploy is now a security problem before it is a productivity win. This Microsoft Agent 365 security … Continue Reading

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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 … Continue Reading

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 … Continue Reading

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GPT-chat-latest in Microsoft Foundry is built on GPT-5.6 Sol, bringing focused responses, improved factual reliability, and consistent behavior to conversational applications without requiring developers to select a newly named model endpoint. This update gives developers access to the latest chat … 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 … Continue Reading

A user asks an AI agent a simple question: “Create a procurement request for 10 laptops for the new project team.” The agent does what it was designed to do. It checks the procurement policy. It verifies budget availability. It … Continue Reading