Building the Future of AI with Azure Databases

Artificial intelligence is no longer an emerging technology; it’s a driving force reshaping industries, disrupting traditional workflows, and creating new opportunities for growth. As enterprises race to integrate AI across their digital ecosystems, one truth has become clear—AI success doesn’t start with algorithms or models. It starts with data.

To truly harness the potential of AI, organizations must build on a trusted, scalable, and secure data foundation. At Microsoft Build 2025, Azure announced a wave of new features and enhancements across its database portfolio, reaffirming its commitment to helping customers modernize their data infrastructure and accelerate AI readiness.

Modernizing Data Infrastructure: Laying the Groundwork for AI

The journey to AI transformation begins with modernizing how data is stored, managed, and accessed. SQL Server 2025, now in public preview, represents a major leap forward for developers and IT teams. Built on a legacy of enterprise-grade performance and security, the latest version introduces AI-native capabilities designed to make data more intelligent and usable.

Highlights of SQL Server 2025 include:

• Semantic Search Integration: Combines traditional full-text search with advanced semantic capabilities, enabling generative AI models to better understand and respond to user queries based on your own data.

• Native JSON Support and REST APIs: Enhances developer productivity by enabling modern data exchange formats and simplified integration with web applications.

• Change Event Streaming: Offers real-time data flow capabilities, ideal for event-driven architectures and up-to-date analytics pipelines.

• Microsoft Entra ID Integration: Delivers enhanced identity and access management, streamlining credential handling while boosting security posture.

• Database Mirroring to OneLake in Fabric: Supports zero-ETL analytics, enabling near real-time insights without complex data movement.

These features are aimed at helping developers deliver intelligent applications faster while maintaining the performance and reliability SQL Server is known for.

In tandem, SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 21 brings modern development capabilities to administrators and engineers. With full 64-bit support, Git integration, and an updated interface built on Visual Studio 2022, SSMS 21 enhances the experience of managing complex database environments. It also introduces a preview of Copilot for T-SQL, offering AI-powered assistance to write, optimize, and debug queries using natural language input.

Developers preferring lighter tools can take advantage of the new MSSQL extension for Visual Studio Code, which integrates GitHub Copilot for in-context AI guidance, accelerating schema exploration, code generation, and optimization tasks.

High-Performance SQL for Mission-Critical AI

For modern AI applications, performance and resilience are paramount. Azure SQL Database Hyperscale has been significantly enhanced to support high-throughput, low-latency workloads essential for real-time intelligence.

New capabilities include:

• Continuous Priming: Ensures replicas are proactively warmed up for immediate failover, reducing recovery time and increasing fault tolerance.

• Faster Log Generation (150 MiB/s): Enables faster data ingestion for write-intensive operations such as telemetry, real-time personalization, or anomaly detection.

These improvements make Hyperscale a powerful platform for enterprises running mission-critical applications that rely on always-available, fast-access data.

Open Source at Enterprise Scale: Advancements in PostgreSQL

Open source databases are increasingly popular for developers building AI-driven solutions. Azure Database for PostgreSQL offers a flexible and scalable foundation, now further enhanced with tools and features that cater to AI workloads.

Key advancements include:

• PostgreSQL Extension for Visual Studio Code (Preview): Developers can now manage PostgreSQL instances directly in VS Code with GitHub Copilot integration, offering AI-assisted query generation and schema management.

• DiskANN Vector Indexing (GA): Supports high-speed similarity search across embeddings, ideal for generative AI applications involving large text or image datasets.

• Semantic Operators (Preview): Adds generative reasoning capabilities, allowing deeper insights from enterprise data where traditional vector searches fall short.

• Azure Premium SSD v2 for HA (Coming Soon): Optimized high availability with reduced performance impact, offering greater durability for write-heavy applications.

These capabilities allow developers to build intelligent, high-performance applications using open-source tools without compromising on enterprise-grade reliability.

Scalable, Distributed Intelligence with Azure Cosmos DB

AI solutions—particularly those powering real-time user experiences or multi-tenant SaaS platforms—demand a database that can scale globally, respond instantly, and ensure continuous availability. Azure Cosmos DB has been engineered with exactly these needs in mind.

Recent innovations in Cosmos DB include:

• Per Partition Automatic Failover (Public Preview): Granular failover capability increases availability during localized disruptions without impacting the entire database.

• Global Secondary Indexes (Public Preview): Also known as materialized views, these read-optimized containers support customized data modeling and indexing strategies for efficient querying at scale.

• Cosmos DB Fleets (Preview): A new resource management feature that enables throughput pooling across accounts, simplifying operations and reducing costs in multi-tenant scenarios.

• Entra ID Authentication for MongoDB vCore (GA): Brings secure, identity-based access management for MongoDB-compatible workloads on Cosmos DB.

In addition, native full-text search and hybrid search capabilities are now generally available, allowing developers to build sophisticated, cost-effective search experiences without needing external services. New previews of fuzzy search, multi-language support, and phrase search further expand Cosmos DB’s search capabilities, making it easier to build flexible, accurate, and user-friendly applications.

Cosmos DB also now supports DiskANN vector indexing in its MongoDB vCore offering, allowing developers to run high-speed, high-dimensional similarity searches directly within the database, streamlining AI deployment.

Unified Analytics with Microsoft Fabric

As organizations collect and store massive volumes of structured and unstructured data, unifying their data estate becomes a strategic imperative. Microsoft Fabric is designed to bring together all aspects of data engineering, analytics, and AI under one integrated platform.

The latest integration of Cosmos DB (NoSQL) into Microsoft Fabric (Preview) allows developers to run analytics on operational data without complex ETL pipelines. This makes it easier to build distributed, high-performance applications that deliver real-time insights.

New capabilities also include the mirroring of SQL Server instances (2016–2025) and Azure SQL Database into Fabric, simplifying data synchronization and enabling consistent, enterprise-wide visibility across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Azure Databases Empowering the AI-First Enterprise

AI is transforming how businesses operate, make decisions, and serve their customers. But to realize its full potential, organizations need a data infrastructure that’s not only powerful and scalable but also flexible and secure.

Azure databases provide exactly that. Whether you’re developing next-generation SaaS applications, training intelligent agents, or enabling real-time insights, Azure offers a robust portfolio of fully managed databases to support your goals.

With continuous innovation across SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Cosmos DB, and Microsoft Fabric, Azure is setting the standard for AI-ready data platforms—helping enterprises turn their data into a strategic asset that drives innovation, intelligence, and impact.

At Quadrant Technologies, we specialize in delivering data and AI solutions that drive measurable impact. To explore how our services can help your business harness the full power of Azure’s intelligent database technologies, get in touch with us at marcomms@quadranttechnologies.com.