SQL Server: 2025 in Review, 2026 on Deck

2025 was loud. I mean the year. Not the edition. SQL Server 2025 went GA. Copilot moved in. Microsoft killed some old friends — Web Edition, Azure Data Studio, DQS, MDS — and handed us some new toys.

What actually matters — and what's coming next.

2025: What Shipped

Regex in tSQL. Twenty years late, but it's here:

SELECT * FROM Customers
WHERE REGEXP_LIKE(Email, '^[A-Za-z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Za-z0-9.-]+\.[A-Za-z]{2,}$');

That's a basic email validation pattern — checks for the stuff before the @, the domain, and the TLD. Not perfect, but good enough to catch obvious junk. No more CLR gymnastics for pattern matching. Finally.

Vector Search. Semantic queries without leaving T-SQL:

SELECT TOP 5 ProductName
FROM Products
ORDER BY VECTOR_DISTANCE('cosine', Embedding, 
    @SearchVector);

Microsoft wants SQL Server to be your vector database. Whether it can keep up with the dedicated tools — the jury's still out.

Native JSON Type. With its own index type:

CREATE TABLE Orders (
    OrderID INT PRIMARY KEY,
    OrderData JSON
);

CREATE JSON INDEX idx_order_customer
ON Orders(OrderData)
FOR ('$.CustomerID');

No more NVARCHAR(MAX) pretending to be JSON. No more computed column gymnastics to get an index.

Copilot in SSMS 21. Natural language to tSQL. Execution plan explanations in English. Useful — if you verify everything it generates.

Standard Edition got teeth. 256GB RAM. Resource Governor. About time.

2026: What's Coming

January 21: SQL Server 2022 End of Sale. If you need it, buy it now.

First half: SDK-style SQL projects in SSMS. Database DevOps gets easier.

All year: CUs for 2025. Expect bugs and expect fixes. The usual dance.

February: Cloud price increases. Plan accordingly.

The theme: Deeper Fabric integration. More Copilot. More AI everywhere. Microsoft is all-in.

The Bottom Line

2025 was the biggest SQL Server year in a decade. New engine. New tools. New expectations.

2026 is about making it real — upgrades, migrations, and finding out what works in production vs what works in demos.

Stay sharp. Verify everything. Trust nothing blindly.

Happy New Year.