Azure SQL Dev Corner
Voices from the Azure SQL PM Team, focusing on development and developers
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Resources for the SQL AI Developer
I see three agentic stories shaping SQL’s future. Here’s how DP-800 connects the pieces and helps you build the skills to put SQL’s AI capabilities to work.
What’s new across Microsoft SQL in 2026 so far: the PASS Summit West roundup
[almost] A year of building on Microsoft SQL - 2026 I'm back with a really long and exhaustive list of updates across Microsoft SQL in 2026. This time I'm tuning in from PASS Summit West, and I actually did this blog as a session with other members from the Microsoft SQL team. I'll put a link to that here once it's live. At PASS Summit West, it's a good time to take stock of what changed this year. From SQLCon/FabCon in Atlanta to Microsoft Build and SQLCon/FabCon Europe in Barcelona, the SQL team has shipped updates across SQL Server, Azure SQL, SQL database in Microsoft Fabric, and the tools you use every...
How do you run a query against data the database can’t read?
Under the Hood: The Research Behind Microsoft SQL, part 3 Encryption at rest solves one threat. It stops someone who walks off with the disk. It does nothing about someone with administrative access to the running server, because the database decrypts data into memory to do anything useful with it. For a lot of workloads that gap doesn’t matter. For health records, financial data, or anything where the customer’s threat model includes the cloud operator, it matters a great deal. Azure SQL Database Always Encrypted (SIGMOD 2020) describes how SQL Server runs real queries, including range comparisons and L...
My Favorite Undocumented Feature in SQL MCP Server
Deploy Microsoft's SQL MCP Server in minutes without a configuration file. Learn how DAB_CONNSTRING enables fast deployment using Docker, Azure Container Apps, ACI, or AKS.
The paper that explains how Microsoft SQL learned to recover without undoing everything first
Under the Hood: The Research Behind Microsoft SQL, part 2 Here’s a scenario that used to be genuinely frightening: you kick off a bulk load of a few hundred million rows in a single transaction. Somewhere in the middle, the server goes down. Not because of your load, just an unlucky reboot. When SQL Server comes back, it has to undo everything that transaction did before anyone can touch those tables. Row by row (I think I’ve heard probably Bob Ward say “row by agonizing row” to describe this). Working backwards through the log. That exact thing happened to an Azure SQL customer, and the team wrote it in...
Is Azure SQL Database Hyperscale “distributed SQL”?
In my last post, I broke down the Socrates paper, the research that became Azure SQL Database Hyperscale. Writing it made me want to tackle a question I think trips a lot of people up when they're choosing a database: is Azure SQL Database Hyperscale "distributed SQL"? It's a fair question. "Distributed SQL" has become shorthand for "the relational database that scales in the cloud," and anything outside that bucket tends to get filed under "the relational one my company already has." I'd rather not leave that to assumption, so here's how I think about it. What people usually mean by "distributed" When ar...
The paper that split the database in four: inside Azure SQL Database Hyperscale, aka Socrates
Under the Hood: The Research Behind Microsoft SQL, part 1 The Microsoft SQL team is always innovating. They do this in day-to-day efforts, but there are also brand new efforts that are constantly being explored, investigated, tested, and researched. Our engineering team partners closely with MSR (Microsoft Research) on some of these efforts. The team writes papers, submits these papers to conferences, and generally gets high recognition for their ingenuity in the databases and cloud space. One thing I’ve been thinking about recently is how little I actually have read the papers being written, and what scena...
Canada’s 2026 time zone updates: guidance for Microsoft SQL
Affected locations in British Columbia, Alberta, and Manitoba will not turn their clocks back at 02:00 local time on November 1, 2026. They will remain at UTC−07:00, UTC−06:00, and UTC−05:00, respectively. Microsoft’s interim guidance for British Columbia, Alberta, and Manitoba describes the new Windows time zones and temporary workarounds. SQL Server on Windows requires the applicable Windows update—not a separate SQL Server product update. For SQL Server on Linux, Azure SQL Database, and Azure SQL Managed Instance, the following guidance applies when the new regional time zones are not yet available in ...
Try SqlClient’s new connection pool for faster parallel connections
You told us that applications using can take too long to establish the database connections they need. When many requests need connections at the same time, waiting for the connection pool to grow can delay application readiness and increase latency. This can happen even in common situations like querying several pieces of metadata during startup or receiving a burst of traffic after a quiet period. ’s new connection pool (Pool V2) is designed to address this problem by establishing new connections concurrently, allowing the pool to respond more quickly when multiple requests need new connections at the same tim...
