Joey on SQL Server

Big Data Platform Changes Emerge at Ignite as Microsoft Broadens Its Azure Focus

Microsoft used its annual conference to roll out sweeping updates across Managed Instance, Cosmos DB, Fabric, PostgreSQL and SQL Server tooling, signaling broad investments in performance, scalability and unified data governance beyond its flagship SQL Server 2025 release.

• By Joey D'Antoni
• 11/18/2025

While SQL Server 2025 was the big data platform news at Microsoft Ignite, as always, there were many other significant data platform announcements at the conference. I wanted to dive deeper into a few of those changes. Managed Instance, Cosmos DB and Fabric all had fairly significant announcements.

One of the most important changes is that Managed Instance General Purpose "NextGen" is now generally available. If you have a Managed Instance and are on the General Purpose tier, stop reading this article, and go to the portal/update your Terraform/write some PowerShell, and migrate those instances post haste. From the couple of customers who switched while in preview, I/O service teams went from multiple seconds to single-digit milliseconds with no other changes. The migration itself takes three to six hours (the few I've tested have been closer to two to three), with a brief outage during cutover. There may be a period of slower performance on your source while the migration process takes a backup, but it's still worth it. This feature gives you a lot more control and granularity over storage performance and costs, and even companies running on the business-critical tier should give it a look.

Microsoft likes to rename things, reuse names, etc. (falling back to one of the key lessons of technology -- naming things is hard). With that in mind, the service formerly known as Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB (vCore) is now Azure DocumentDB. There's more to this than just the name change. Microsoft has aligned DocumentDB to the DocumentDB open source standard, which the Linux Foundation governs. These changes deliver an open, community-driven MongoDB-compatible database engine that runs in Azure and can easily migrate to other clouds. Like just about everything else at Ignite, there is an AI angle here, as DocumentDB is called "AI-ready for vector and hybrid search." Cosmos DB is a compelling platform -- the vCore offering helped organizations achieve more predictable costing, and aligning with this open standard is a good strategy to encourage developers to use this database platform more widely.

My current project runs on PostgreSQL so it's an area of strong interest to me. Last spring I had the opportunity to work with the Azure PostgreSQL team on some promotional initiatives, so I've had some early information and excitement about this offering. Microsoft announced the private preview of "Azure HorizonDB," a scale-out PostgreSQL deployment. Microsoft states that transactions and vector search are up to three times faster than open-source Postgres. The vector search technology leverages Microsoft's DiskANN (approximate nearest neighbor) technology, which is also available in SQL Server 2025. Based on my understanding, this leverages the latest Azure infrastructure, enabling customers to build extremely large-scale workloads. I would compare this at a very high level to Azure SQL Database hyperscale, but for Postgres. The team has done an excellent job of building a good PostgreSQL service, before HorizonDB, so this will be an interesting path.

Fabric Databases in both SQL database and Cosmos DB flavors are now generally available. Both database offerings are closely aligned to their Azure cousins, however, there are still some feature gaps, so review the requirements of your application and make sure they align to the Fabric databases. The grand vision for this is that you could run your online transaction processing (think point of sale system) in Fabric, feeding directly into your data lake, allowing to get rapid insights into your who data estate in one system. Which leads us into our next Fabric announcement.

Building on Fabric's goal to be the Swiss Army knife of data services is a part of a larger announcement. Microsoft announced "Fabric IQ will unify all data with operational systems under a semantic model of business entities and their relationships — providing a live, connected view of the enterprise." This was part of an announcement called Work IQ, that combines AI tools across Microsoft 365 Copilot, Fabric IQ, and Foundry IQ, which are designed to better allow AI agents to understand and act on "context rich insights". This announcement was completely new to me—I wasn't briefed earlier. Conceptually, I think taking advantage of OneLake in Fabric being a centralized repository for an AI repository could be a good idea. However, like any data driven AI solution, data governance, and the ensuring clean data is going to be key to success with WorkIQ features. In the press release Microsoft made reference to governance: "Teams will be able to define this model once and reuse it everywhere across analytics, apps and agents, improving reasoning quality while preserving governance and lineage".  Stay tuned to Redmond for more information on FabricIQ in the coming months.

There were also a few other announcements I wanted to touch on around SQL Server that aren't directly related to the SQL Server 2025 launch. A week ago, Microsoft quietly announced the general availability of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 22. There are several changes here, but the biggest difference is that SSMS 22 uses GitHub Copilot as an AI assistant. The AI functionality in SSMS 21 needed to be connected to an Azure AI foundry endpoint, which was complex, and added additional costs. SSMS 22 also supports some enhancements for Fabric SQL database, ARM64 support, and better JSON display functionality. Also, if you are like me and do a lot of database presentations, you can zoom in on the results grid. Additionally, at Ignite, a new Python driver for SQL Server was announced (mssql-python), which promises better performance and a better developer experience.

Like every other Ignite in recent years, there was a heavy AI focus, even in light of recent discussion about the AI financial bubble around the costs of AI being orders of magnitude higher than revenue. However, Microsoft continues to go all in, announcing a new partnership with Nvidia and Anthropic on Tuesday, with a $5 billion investment from Microsoft. Beyond the AI hype, there are a lot of interesting features and enhancements both across the data platform and SQL Server 2025. Additionally, I'll do a column later this week on other Azure enhancements that didn't make the front page of announcements. If you have a legacy app running on IIS on Windows 2003, you may want to read that one.