If you aren’t watching the Ignite keynotes today, then you might have missed the announcement that SQL Server 2025 officially releases today. The main SQL Server page gives you a place to get some marketing info, while the docs should change to remove “preview” today.
I’ll have some thoughts later in the week, but this has been a low key release for me. While I’ve been hearing about different features, both publicly and under my MVP NDA, there hasn’t seemed to be a lot of people excited about the release.
That makes some sense as the product is very mature, and most of us use the core features, which sometimes get improvements in new versions, and sometimes regressions.
In any case, as I look through the What’s New, there is a lot of stuff changing, and a lot of additions. I always like the T-SQL language changes, and with so many people using JSON these days, having more functions to work with these strings is important. Regex is meh for me, but fuzzy string matching is interesting.
SSMS v22 also goes GA today, and I hope it’s more stable than the preview has been. I’ve tried the GitHub Copilot in here, and I keep seeing freezes in the app. However, I also think this is a feature that will get a lot of data professionals experimenting with AI. Of course, if you have SQL Prompt, I’d suggest you try it there first.
The big thing that I’d have appreciated in a lot of jobs, and I think a number of customers will like is a Standard Edition version of Developer Edition. That prevents mistakes where devs read about something on SQL Server Central or elsewhere and then implement it in dev, without realizing it won’t work in their production Standard Edition version.
I don’t know how excited many of you are to use this version, but it’s the latest one and starts the clock on 10 years of support for security fixes. We’ve had a few lately, so at this point, if I were upgrading an older instance, SQL Server 2025 is where I’d go. Especially now that Standard Edition can run with 256GB of RAM. That alone might get me to upgrade some older SE instances.
Voice of the DBA 
Steve – I am more than happy to wait on you giving it a test run and a review before I mess with the thing. I’ve experienced to many “Oooops” when trying to use the absolute latest and [not always so] greatest version of<list name of favorite software here>.
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Lol, I tend to be the same a lot, but I will experiment with things. One thing I’ve often done is re-run a lot of the things I’ve done in the past as demos/PoCs for customers on the new version, just to be sure nothing has broken that I expect to work.
Then I’ll start looking at new stuff and trying to decide if it’s good enough to use in prod.
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I agree that this has felt low key. I was also surprised when Bob Ward’s SQL Server 2025 Revealed book arrived the other day and it was a ⅓ the size (if not smaller) than 2019 and 2022’s releases (and the first ¼ is all about AI). It really didn’t feel like Microsoft have been talking about it much, and I’ve not seen as much buzz about it as previous releases either when it does come with some nice new features.
It’ll be interesting to hopefully see some articles coming out other the coming weeks from the usual suspects.
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I hadn’t seen the book live, but I think the thickness speaks to the maturity of the product. I’ll be writing more articles on language changes and maybe a few of the others
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