SQL Server 2025 release

Microsoft has announced the release of SQL Server 2025. The solution can be downloaded using the following link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/

Among the new features available, we have:

• The introduction of the Standard Developer Edition, which offers the same features as the Standard Edition, but is free when used in a non-production environment, similar to the Enterprise Developer Edition (formerly Developer Edition).

• The removal of the Web Edition.

• The Express Edition can now host databases of up to 50 GB. In practice, it is quite rare to see our customers use the Express Edition. It generally serves as a toolbox or for very specific scenarios where the previous 10 GB limit was not an issue. Therefore, lifting this limit will not have a major impact due to the many other restrictions it still has.

• The introduction of AI capabilities within the database engine, including vector indexes, vector data types, and the corresponding functions.

• For development purposes, SQL Server introduces a native JSON data type and adds support for regular expressions (regex).

• Improvements to Availability Groups, such as the ability to offload full, differential, and transaction log backups to a secondary replica.

• The introduction of optimized locking and a new ZSTD algorithm for backup compression.

We also note the release of SQL Server Management Studio 22.

References :

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/sql-server/what-s-new-in-sql-server-2025?view=sql-server-ver17
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/sqlserver/sql-server-2025-is-now-generally-available/4470570
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/ssms/release-notes-22

Thank you. Amine Haloui