But these features are “very 2023”, said dbInsight chief analyst Tony Baer. “Microsoft is several years behind AWS, Google, Oracle, and others when it comes to multimodal data, streaming, and Python support,” he said.
But there is one area in which SQL Server 2025 is ahead of the competition, said Aslett: Model management.
SQL Server packages model definitions right inside T-SQL, the language used by the database. In a blog post, Priya Sathy, partner director of product management at Microsoft’s SQL division, said, “The model definition can connect to AI services such as Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, OpenAI, and Ollama among others: Models are all accessed through REST APIs allowing developers to deploy any model securely isolated from the SQL Server engine.”
