Across the announcements we shared in Barcelona, SQL continues to build on the foundation enterprises have trusted for decades. This gives organizations more control where their workloads run, more room for applications to grow, and more intelligent tools for operating databases in the agentic era.

Running data and AI on infrastructure you control

For organizations across Europe, digital sovereignty has become a priority. They need greater control over where data resides without putting modern app development, performance, or AI beyond reach.

This is a reality that Microsoft SQL has been preparing for decades, steadily strengthening security, resilience, and performance across its ecosystem. Capabilities such as Transparent Data Encryption, released in 2008, Always Encrypted in 2016, and Ledger in 2022 have continued to strengthen the security and control organizations need for sovereign environments.

Building on this history, we’re now announcing general availability of SQL Server on Azure Local for both connected and disconnected operations.

This release brings the Azure control plane and management to customer-controlled environments, providing a consistent SQL and Azure experience for workloads that need to remain close to their applications, users, or physical operations. This includes:

• Connected deployments: Organizations can use Azure-based management while keeping workloads and data local.
• Azure Local Disconnected Operations (ALDO): Organizations get a local control plane for their private sovereign environments, supporting operations where cloud connectivity is unavailable or restricted.

For organizations that want to leverage AI in these environments, Foundry Local on Azure Local, now in preview, enables teams to build AI experiences close to their data. Applications, databases, and AI models can remain within the customer-controlled environment, so sovereignty requirements don’t put AI innovation out of reach.

For deployment options, licensing, and local AI capabilities, learn more about SQL Server on Azure Local.

Giving applications room to grow with Azure SQL Database Hyperscale

As applications mature, their demands rarely stay predictable. Workloads grow, usage patterns change, and the database needs to constantly adapt without forcing teams to rethink the application architecture around it.

Azure SQL Database Hyperscale is designed to provide flexibility while delivering the performance applications need. Azure SQL Database Hyperscale is SQL Server rearchitected for cloud scale. By decoupling compute and storage, Hyperscale gives applications room to evolve and the scale to meet more demanding workloads.

Now, we’re extending that flexibility and performance even further:

• More compute: 160 and 192 vCore Premium-series service objectives are now generally available.
• More scale and better cost efficiency: Hyperscale serverless auto-pause scales to zero and instantly resumes. Along with higher-density elastic pools, both these features are now in preview, providing cost efficiency to customers.
• Vector search: DiskANN vector indexes are now generally available, bringing high-performance vector search to operational data. SQL’s vector index now has full DML support, allowing you to modify data in vector-indexed tables while the index automatically stays updated in real-time.
• A simpler path to Hyperscale: A new Azure Arc migration experience is in preview, bringing assessment, provisioning, migration, validation, and cutover into a centralized workflow.

The scale figures become more meaningful when they represent businesses preparing for the moments when demand is highest and the tolerance for disruption is lowest. SAP Commerce Cloud offers a compelling example.

SAP and Microsoft developed a plan to migrate over 6,000 production databases to Azure SQL Database Hyperscale while prioritizing a seamless transition for customers. Hyperscale removed earlier storage and compute ceilings, giving SAP access to as many as 192 vCores and 128 TB of storage for individual databases, alongside zone redundancy supporting a 99.995 percent service-level agreement.

The result: SAP Commerce Cloud processed $17.8 billion in merchandise with 100 percent uptime during Black Friday and handled nearly 11,000 orders per minute at peak. That is the kind of growth a database platform must be ready to support.

Our goal is to give customers the ability to choose a strong foundation early and keep building on it. Hyperscale combines the familiar SQL platform with an architecture that accommodates changing application needs, including new AI experiences operating directly on business data.

Turning database signals into guided action

As applications and database estates grow, signals become scattered across engines and environments, making issues harder to spot and resolve.

Database Hub in Microsoft Fabric, now in public preview, brings inventory, health, performance, security, risk, and optimization signals into a centralized view of your database estate. Administrators and developers can quickly see where attention is needed, explore aggregated or per-resource trends and opportunities through consolidated charts and dashboards, and act from within the hub using database agents.

Database agents for SQL and PostgreSQL on Azure help turn these signals into guided action. The agents reason over database signals, continuously helping administrators understand performance bottlenecks, identify optimization opportunities, recommend actions, and, within appropriate guardrails, help carry those actions forward. SQL Database Agent combines SQL’s native intelligence that includes IQP (Intelligent Query Processing), which is based on decades of domain-specific development and workload telemetry. Intelligent Query Processing, along with AI for reasoning, makes it the industry’s best DB agent.

The preview experience begins with database agents for SQL in Database Hub and for PostgreSQL in Visual Studio Code, with these capabilities coming to both surfaces over time. Our vision is a consistent, extensible agent experience that works cohesively across the tools and environments developers and database professionals use, rather than intelligence tied to a single interface.

Across these agentic operations, human judgment remains central. The aim is to shorten the distance between a signal and a well-informed action while respecting existing permissions, operational guardrails, and developer control.

Bringing AI assistance into familiar developer workflows

As AI continues to become a bigger part of database development, our goal is to make it useful in the tools and workflows developers and DBAs already rely on.

Agent Mode for GitHub Copilot in SQL Server Management Studio is now generally available, helping developers reason across database objects and complete multistep tasks from a single goal or prompt. It can investigate dependencies, analyze execution plans, generate and evaluate DDL, review proposed changes, and iteratively gather context to help users move complex database work forward. SQL Projects and Schema Compare are also generally available in SSMS, alongside SQL Formatter in SSMS and Visual Studio Code, making it easier to bring database changes into source control and maintain consistent T-SQL.

We are also extending these capabilities beyond the development environment. Data API builder adds vector and JSON support to help connect SQL data with modern applications and agents through REST, GraphQL, and MCP endpoints.

Together, these announcements help teams bring AI into database development while keeping familiar tools and engineering practices at the center.

What we build next

Thank you for being part of this community. The announcements we have made at SQLCon Barcelona are a milestone, but the work that matters most is what you carry home and create with it. Whether that means revisiting your applications’ digital sovereignty needs, giving them room to grow, or finding a better way to understand and manage your data estate, we want our investment in SQL to help turn that momentum into something valuable for our users and customers. Here’s where you can start:

• Deploy SQL Server on Azure Local
• Deploy SQL Server on Azure Local Disconnected Operations
• Move your database to Azure SQL Database Hyperscale
• Try Database Hub in public preview

You can learn in greater detail about all the announcements at aka.ms/sqlconnews. Thank you for your continued trust and we cannot wait to see what you build with SQL. Until then, adios!

The post SQLCon Barcelona 2026: Advancing SQL with greater control, scale, and intelligence appeared first on Microsoft SQL Server Blog.

This year is especially meaningful, as it marks the return of a Microsoft‑led SQL community event, while also showcasing how SQL continues to evolve as a critical part of Fabric. It is not just about new technology, but about reconnecting with each other and building the future of SQL together.

It’s inspiring to see the Microsoft SQL community continue to grow and engage, with user groups worldwide keeping conversations active across the SQL portfolio and a lot of customers using Microsoft SQL to innovate every day. With a comprehensive portfolio built on strategic common foundations and available across edge, PaaS, and SaaS, Microsoft databases form a unified platform for modern enterprise needs, whether you are migrating and modernizing, building cloud-native AI applications, or unifying your data.

Migrate and modernize with Azure SQL

Many of our customers are not modernizing in one big leap. You are evolving from SQL Server to hybrid and then to cloud services, and you want that journey to feel familiar, predictable, and low risk. That is exactly what Azure SQL is designed to deliver. Built on a consistent Microsoft SQL foundation from on premises to the cloud, Azure SQL brings AI capabilities directly into your database experience, along with enterprise‑grade security, high availability, and the flexibility to scale as your needs grow. Azure SQL is fully SQL compatible, delivers strong performance and low latency, and supports hybrid scenarios through Azure Arc.

AI agents are becoming an important accelerator for database migration and modernization at Microsoft, helping our customers reduce manual effort and move faster with more guided experiences across the journey. The general availability of GitHub Copilot in SSMS 22 is a great example of that investment in action: you can use the same GitHub Copilot experience you already use in Visual Studio and VS Code, now inside SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), with chat and code assistance that helps you write, edit, and refactor T‑SQL more quickly and confidently. Whether you are a developer or database administrator (DBA), new to SQL or highly experienced, GitHub Copilot can support common workflows like improving queries and assisting with troubleshooting and administration tasks right where you work, and we are continuing to expand what it can do.

Today we are announcing savings plan for databases, a flexible, spend-based pricing option that helps you save up to 35%¹ vs. pay-as-you-go prices on a one-year commitment. Savings plan for databases is designed for modern, evolving database environments: Customers commit to a fixed hourly spend for one year and receive lower prices across eligible Azure database services. Savings are automatically applied to the highest-value usage each hour, helping reduce costs while supporting migration, modernization, and architectural change.

Build cloud-native AI apps at scale

Once you move to the cloud, the questions shift. How do you build faster, scale smarter, and unlock more value from your data without re‑architecting everything you have already built? That is where Azure SQL Database Hyperscale comes in.

With Azure SQL Database Hyperscale, customers gain better price-performance, elastic scale and resilience for any workload, without the cost or disruption of rewriting T‑SQL or reworking operational models. Its unique architecture, built on shared storage and multiple replicas, allows you to scale reads independently from writes. With built‑in HTAP isolation, applications can handle massive transactional and analytical workloads without complex redesign. New capabilities now in public preview extend that foundation even further, including the SQL MCP Server for securely connecting SQL data to AI agents and Copilots, as well as larger 160 and 192 vCore options for high‑throughput workloads.

We’re delivering faster, more capable vector indexes to power AI applications. Recent enhancements improve vector search performance and efficiency with no code changes required. With full insert, update, and delete support, vector indexes stay current in real time, enabling dynamic applications. Features like quantization, iterative filtering, and tighter query optimizer integration provide faster, more predictable results, helping teams build responsive AI experiences directly on their SQL data.

Temenos built its next‑generation banking platform, Temenos Core, on Azure using Azure SQL Database Hyperscale to achieve global scale, high availability, and resilient performance. The platform processes billions of transactions daily and more than 17,500 transactions per second at peak. By building on Hyperscale, Temenos reduced onboarding time, accelerated innovation, and shifted banks from worrying about downtime to competing on availability and digital innovation.

Unify your data estate with SQL database in Fabric

We continue to raise the bar on enterprise readiness for SQL database in Fabric by bringing enterprise-grade security and compliance capabilities directly into the platform. Today at SQLCon, we announced the general availability of features including SQL Auditing, Customer‑Managed Keys, and Dynamic Data Masking, and the preview of workspace‑level Private Link. We brought these enhancements to help customers meet strict governance and regulatory requirements without adding operational complexity. The result is confidence that your SQL workloads in Fabric are secure, compliant, and ready for production.

SQL database in Fabric is becoming even more powerful for AI‑driven applications. The same vector indexing enhancements available in Azure SQL Database Hyperscale are now built into SQL database in Fabric as well. Because both are powered by the same Microsoft SQL engine, customers benefit from consistent performance, capabilities, and innovation across the SQL portfolio—making it easier to build intelligent applications wherever their data lives.

Finally, moving to SQL database in Fabric is simpler than ever. The Migration Assistant now supports SQL database in Fabric as a target destination. It provides a Copilot-assisted experience that helps SQL developers assess readiness, migrate schema, identify compatibility issues, and copy data with less manual effort. By preserving familiar SQL skills and workflows, customers can modernize at their own pace while accelerating time to value on Fabric’s unified analytics and AI platform.

There is one more Fabric innovation that matters deeply for how we deliver Microsoft databases as a unified platform. As applications grow more sophisticated, most organizations now rely on a mix of SQL and NoSQL databases across cloud, on‑premises, and edge environments. Provisioning, monitoring, and maintaining health across a growing database fleet often requires multiple tools and portals, making it harder to see what’s happening and manage at scale.

To address this, we are introducing the Database Hub in Microsoft Fabric, now available in early access. The Database Hub provides a unified database management experience that brings together databases across edge, cloud, and Fabric into one coherent view. From a single place, database teams can explore, observe, govern, and optimize their entire estate, including Azure SQL, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, SQL Server enabled by Azure Arc, and Azure Database for MySQL without changing how each service is deployed or operated.

Built for scale, the Database Hub introduces an agent-assisted, human-in-the-loop approach to database management. Intelligent agents continuously reason over estate-wide signals to surface what changed, explain why it matters, and guide teams toward what to do next, while built-in observability, delegated governance, and Copilot-powered insights help teams move from insight to action with greater confidence. With the Database Hub, teams spend less time navigating tools and more time enabling what comes next: unlocking deeper integration across applications, analytics, and AI from a single control plane for the Microsoft databases portfolio.

Database Hub is available today in early access. Sign up today and see how the Database Hub can bring clarity and control to your database estate.

Moving forward with the SQL community

SQLCon is about bringing the SQL community together. It is about rebuilding connections and shared learning. It also reflects our long-term commitment to SQL. With a comprehensive portfolio built on strategic common foundations and available across edge, PaaS, and SaaS, Microsoft databases provide a unified platform for modern enterprise needs, whether you are migrating and modernizing, building cloud-native AI applications, or unifying your data. We are investing in SQL for the future, alongside the community that continues to shape it.

Finally, SQLCon is coming to Europe! Join the global data and SQL community from 28 Sep – 01st October, 2026 in Barcelona, Spain for hands-on learning, expert insights, and real-world stories. Register to be a part of it. I can’t wait to see you there.

Additional SQL resources

• Microsoft Azure Summit: Migrate and Modernize with Agentic AI
• What is new about SQL database in Fabric
• Learn more about savings plan for databases

¹Customers may see savings estimated to be between 0% and 35%. The 35% savings estimate is based on one Azure SQL Database serverless running for 12 months at a pay-as-you-go rate vs. a reduced rate for a 1-year savings plan. Based on Azure pricing as of March 2026. Prices are subject to change. Actual savings may vary based on location, database service, and/or usage. 

The post Advancing agentic AI with Microsoft databases across a unified data estate appeared first on Microsoft SQL Server Blog.

We are excited to get back in front of customers at Microsoft Ignite 2023 and PASS Data Community Summit to announce powerful product enhancements across Microsoft Azure databases designed to help customers take the next step or the first step in their transformation journey, with databases that are intelligent, trusted, and ready for developers to build, without limits.   

Limitless innovation for cloud native applications

If you are an application developer looking for a flexible relational cloud database solution with performance and scalability to support your most demanding applications, you’ll want to check out Microsoft Azure SQL Database Hyperscale. Built on a unique architecture that splits the storage and compute nodes, these resources scale independently to meet the unique requirements of your apps. Plus, you can eliminate the need to pre-provision storage resources, as the storage automatically scales to meet demand, with support of up to 100 TB. We are thrilled to announce that we are introducing lower compute pricing on SQL Database Hyperscale, saving customers up to 35 percent on their compute bill. Effective December 15, 2023, customers will have competitive pricing on the resources they need to build scalable, secure, AI-ready applications. 

We’re also excited to share that the Microsoft Azure SQL Managed Instance feature wave has reached general availability. This set of features improves Azure SQL Managed Instance’s performance, reliability, and security. The latest release will deliver deeper integration with Microsoft SQL Server on-premises and the wider Azure service platform. And soon, customers will be able to start testing Azure SQL Managed Instance for free. Landing in December 2023, customers will be able to run proof of concepts, test applications or simply learn more about the operational benefits of a fully managed database-as-a-service. This is in addition to the free Azure SQL Database offer that launched in October 2023.  

Microsoft is also excited to share the newest updates for our fully managed community based open-source databases. These services help you manage your database and database infrastructure with automation, freeing you from the routine database management tasks so you can concentrate on what matters most.

Enhanced performance and scalability for Microsoft Azure Database for PostgreSQL

The latest enhancements for Azure Database for PostgreSQL deliver advanced storage and compute capabilities that enable optimal price-performance for enterprise production workloads. Customers can expect enhancements for advanced storage, compute capabilities, and flexibility for managing performance and cost.  

Azure Database for PostgreSQL extension for Azure AI

The PostgreSQL extension for Azure AI allows developers to use large language models (LLMs) and build rich PostgreSQL generative AI applications, meaning PostgreSQL queries on Azure can now power Azure AI applications. It enables calling into Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to generate LLM-based vector embeddings that allow efficient similarity searches, which is particularly powerful for recommendation systems, as well as calling into Azure AI Language for a wide range of scenarios such as sentiment analysis, language detection, entity recognition, and more.

New performance enhancements in Microsoft Azure Database for MySQL Business Critical 

New performance enhancements in Azure Database for MySQL Business Critical service tier makes it ideal for high-performance transactional or analytical applications. In fact, a recent performance benchmark study by Principled Technologies shows that Azure Database for MySQL Business Critical service tier is up to 50 percent faster than MySQL on Amazon Web Services Relational Data Service and up to 2.26 times faster than Google Cloud Platform Cloud SQL for MySQL. These key innovations help make Azure Database for MySQL Business Critical the perfect option to run mission-critical, Tier 1 MySQL workloads.

Extend Azure to your entire data estate

For all the innovation that customers are driving in the cloud, we recognize much of the customer’s data remains on-premises. This is why Microsoft continues to invest heavily in ensuring that customers can get the most from their entire data estate with Microsoft Azure Arc. The latest monitoring capabilities from SQL Server-enabled by Azure Arc are designed to deliver critical insights across your entire SQL Server environments, optimizing database performance and delivering fast diagnostic times.  

Customers can also now improve SQL Server business continuity and consistency by viewing and managing Always On availability groups, failover cluster instances, and backups directly from the Azure portal. This capability provides better visibility and an easier, more flexible way to configure critical database operations.  

In addition, with Extended Security Updates as a service and automated patching, customers can always keep their apps secure, compliant, and up to date. Learn more about these latest features.

We look forward to the week ahead and connecting with you in person.

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