Building Intelligent AI Apps with Microsoft Databases

Shireesh_Thota

Microsoft

May 19, 2025

AI is no longer a future ambition—it’s a present-day imperative. To be truly AI-ready, enterprises need a trusted, scalable data foundation. Azure databases provide the performance, resiliency and security needed to power modern AI solutions, enabling organizations to unlock insights, personalize experiences, and innovate with confidence. Our database announcements at Build 2025 highlight our commitment to helping customers build upon a strong foundation for using AI to create new possibilities.

We’re living in a transformative era—where AI is no longer a futuristic vision, but an urgent, present-day imperative. Organizations across every industry are racing to integrate intelligent solutions that can streamline operations, unlock insights, and deliver deeply personalized experiences. But here’s the truth: AI readiness doesn’t start with the model—it starts with the data. And for enterprises, having the right data infrastructure in place isn’t just helpful, it’s mission critical.

That’s where Azure databases come in. At Microsoft, we understand that to be truly AI-ready, organizations need a data foundation that’s built on trust, scale, and resilience, so they can innovate boldly, securely, and at scale. Modern AI solutions—from copilots to autonomous agents—thrive on data at scale. And not just traditional structured data like customer records or transactions, but massive volumes of unstructured data: documents, images, logs, conversations, sensor outputs, and more.

Today's announcements highlight our commitment to helping customers fully unlock the potential of their data, building upon a strong foundation for using AI to create new possibilities and opportunities.

Modernize your data for AI Readiness

Modernizing your data is a critical first step in making it more accessible, reliable and usable for AI app development. SQL developers love the scalability and agility they can achieve in the cloud, and we’ve brought many of those cloud benefits on-premises with SQL Server 2025. This release has already resonated well with more than 3,400 applicants for our private preview program, with full adoption coming twice as fast as SQL Server 2022. We’re excited to announce public preview of SQL Server 2025, our most significant release of SQL Server in the last decade.

SQL Server 2025 empowers developers to build modern AI applications using their own data. Built on a foundation known for best-in-class security and performance, SQL Server 2025 will accelerate time-to-market for your new applications with features designed to boost developer productivity while keeping your data safe. Make the most of Microsoft’s most significant release of SQL Server in the last decade to:

Boost search intelligence using advanced semantic search alongside full text search and filtering - allowing you to run generative AI models of your choice using your own data.

Process and manage data flows more simply and efficiently using native JSON support, built-in REST API, Change Event Streaming for real-time data updates.

Leverage the most secure database to improve credential management and reduce potential vulnerabilities with support for Microsoft Entra managed identities through Azure Arc.

Increase workload uptime and improve concurrency for SQL Server applications with enhanced query optimization, optimized locking and improved failover reliability.

Achieve zero-ETL, real-time analytics by replicating SQL Server data to Microsoft OneLake with Fabric database mirroring.

See SQL Server 2025 in action and learn how you can get started today.

“We are excited about the future of SQL Server 2025 and the transformative

improvements it brings to database performance and management.”

Madhab Paudel, Database Engineer, Entain

SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) is the go-to tool for developers and database administrators managing, configuring and querying SQL Server databases. Today we’re taking a leap forward with the general availability of SQL Server Management Studio 21, now built on Visual Studio 2022 and including 64-bit support, Git integration, an enhanced user interface and more. We’re further enhancing the user experience with the preview of Copilot in SSMS 21, providing an AI-powered assistant to help with writing, editing and fixing T-SQL queries using natural language.

Visual Studio (VS) Code has become a favorite among developers for its lightweight design, powerful extensions, and seamless support for a wide range of programming languages and workflows. Today we’re announcing the preview of MSSQL extension for Visual Studio Code with GitHub Copilot capabilities. GitHub Copilot also brings natural language capabilities and helps developers explore schemas, optimize queries with intelligent suggestions, and streamline database interactions—all within VS Code.

For mission-critical workloads, performance and availability are non-negotiable. We’re excited to announce the general availability of two major performance upgrades in Azure SQL Database Hyperscale. Continuous priming now ensures faster failover recovery by proactively warming up secondary replicas, minimizing downtime and boosting resilience. Additionally, the log generation rate has increased to 150 MiB/s, enabling significantly faster data ingestion and improved performance for write-heavy workloads. These enhancements make Hyperscale even more powerful for critical applications.

“When we process new data, we have a massive amount that needs to go out immediately. Azure SQL Database Hyperscale was the only tier that allowed us to do a massive data push without affecting the user experience in our platform.”

Marco De Sanctis, Chief Technology Officer, Mondra Global Limited

Modern application development demands speed and flexibility and JSON enables developers to model complex, evolving data without rigid schemas. We’re happy to announce that the native JSON type and JSON aggregates in Azure SQL Database are generally available, enabling more efficient reads, writes and storage. JSON indexing, now in preview for Azure SQL Database, allows for more efficient searching of JSON documents using JSON functions and relational operators.

Experience open flexibility with Azure scale

Open source databases play a critical role in shaping the future of intelligent applications, with PostgreSQL being the most popular according to Stack Overflow’s 2024 Developer Survey. Microsoft proudly supports open source, and our recent investments into both the open-source Postgres project and our cloud services underscore our commitment to making the developer experience better than ever, using AI to shape how apps are built.

Today, we’re announcing the preview of a new and improved PostgreSQL extension for Visual Studio (VS) Code with GitHub Copilot capabilities. With this powerful tool, you can connect to PostgreSQL database instances, run queries, create and manage connection profiles, take advantage of Entra ID support, and more—all within VS Code. Designed to boost your productivity and streamline development, the extension includes the ability to chat with GitHub Copilot for PostgreSQL context and AI assistance and support for deployments in Docker, on premises or on Azure.

For AI app developers, database speed and availability are critical to ensuring AI models can access and process data quickly. We are pleased to announce that DiskANN, one of the fastest vector indexing algorithms on the market, is now generally available on Azure Database for PostgreSQL. With this release, developers can leverage the new product quantization optimizations in DiskANN to build high performance, low latency and scalable generative AI applications that outperform pgvector index types. Also coming soon, you can enable high availability (HA) with Azure Premium SSD v2 disks while deploying Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server. We’ve rearchitected HA for SSD v2 and most workloads will typically see less performance impact when using high availability in SSD v2 vs SSD v1.

“Azure Database for PostgreSQL gives us greater performance capabilities and flexibility, enabling smaller teams to do more—especially when managing large numbers of databases.”

Mike Jasperson, VP, IoT Software Operations and Support, PTC

Vector search is vital for generative AI but often misses semantic relationships in enterprise data. We’re introducing generative AI-powered reasoning in PostgreSQL with the preview of semantic operators in Azure Database for PostgreSQL. By adding semantic understanding to the levels of operational data that are not visible to vector search, customers can gain deeper insights from their data, allowing applications to reason in ways that were not possible before. 

Build no-compromise SaaS apps that scale

AI applications thrive on real-time, reliable, and always accessible data, making enterprise-grade availability and global scale foundational to their success. For multi-tenant SaaS platforms delivering intelligent experiences, even brief data outages or latency can disrupt AI model performance and degrade user trust. Azure Cosmos DB provides the distributed architecture, multi-region replication, low latency, and elastic scalability needed to meet these demands.

Today we’re announcing the public preview of per partition automatic failover for Azure Cosmos DB. This new capability intelligently routes requests at a more granular partition level during localized or regional outages, helping you achieve active-active 5’9s availability for any workload type, any consistency level from eventual to strong. You’ll benefit from stronger, built-in resiliency, reduced downtime, and less operational overhead—helping to ensure that your applications remain consistently available and reliable. 

We’re further optimizing queries on Azure Cosmos DB with a global secondary index, now in public preview. Previously known as materialized views, global secondary indexes are read-only containers that automatically sync data from a source container. They have an independent partition key, data model, and index policy, allowing you to fine-tune them for any query pattern. And now, you can create index containers using Azure portal.

Managing multi-tenant SaaS apps is complex—balancing diverse customer needs with performance, scalability, and security. With Azure Cosmos DB fleets, now in preview, you can streamline operations by pooling throughput (RU/s) across accounts, reducing overprovisioning while maintaining tenant-level isolation and security. It’s a simpler, more efficient way to scale and manage Azure Cosmos DB resources for multi-tenant scenarios.

Managing user access across tenants quickly becomes complex and error-prone without centralized identity control. Today we announced the general availability of Microsoft Entra ID authentication for Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB (vCore), enhancing security and simplifying identity management. With this update, you can now add Entra ID accounts directly to your MongoDB vCore clusters and use them for secure database access.

Azure AI Foundry simplifies project management and deployments while integrating advanced AI capabilities. Developers can now use Azure Cosmos DB accounts to power AI solutions within the platform. Using the Azure AI Foundry SDK, customers can now securely store conversation threads between users and AI agents in Azure Cosmos DB accounts, enabling agents to recall and resume previous discussions. Threads storage is now generally available. Also, developers will soon have the capability to utilize data stored in their Azure Cosmos DB accounts for powering AI solutions in Azure AI Foundry. Customers will be able to connect and access their Azure Cosmos DB data using Azure AI Foundry within application code.

We’re also announcing the public preview of Azure AI Foundry connection for Azure Databricks, enabling Foundry Agents to use AI/BI Genie and run Azure Databricks Jobs. This can enhance knowledge retrieval and broadens how Foundry Agents deliver contextual answers grounded in enterprise data. Foundry Agents can now reason across Microsoft’s entire ecosystem, including Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Microsoft Fabric, and Azure Databricks— providing a robust foundation for building intelligent AI applications.

We’re making several announcements focused on enhancing the search capabilities of your applications. Now generally available, native full-text and hybrid search capabilities mean you can use Azure Cosmos DB for NoSQL to efficiently create sophisticated applications and GenAI solutions, reducing complexity and costs compared to using external search services.  We’re continuing to invest here with the previews of fuzzy text search and full-text search and scoring in multiple languages in Azure Cosmos DB for NoSQL. These new features enable developers to deliver more flexible and forgiving search experiences alongside full-text indexing and BM25-based ranking across a growing set of languages. Rounding out our search enhancements, phrase search is now generally available and makes your full-text search more precise and powerful by matching entire phrases rather than just individual keywords.

“We found Cosmos DB built-in hybrid search to be 50-60 times cheaper than other search services we evaluated, providing us performance and resiliency Docusign needs.”

Kunal Mukerjee, VP of AI Technology Strategy, Docusign

Finally, DiskANN is now generally available in vCore-based Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB, bringing powerful vector search capabilities directly into the database. With support for up to 4,000 dimensions, you can efficiently search across high-dimensional data like text embeddings and images—enabling low-latency, high-accuracy AI experiences without the need for a separate vector store.

“With our virtual assistant in particular, we have experienced the higher scale, higher availability, and faster time to market of using Azure Cosmos DB.”

Viju Chacko, Head of Digital Architecture, Air India

Unify your data estate on Microsoft Fabric

With Microsoft Fabric, our vision is to simplify how you interact with data by bringing together all the tools you need on a single platform. We're expanding that vision with the unification of data estates with the preview of Cosmos DB (NoSQL) in Fabric. Based on Azure Cosmos DB, Cosmos DB in Fabric brings the same enterprise-grade dynamic scalability for unstructured data types that the world’s largest retailers and large-scale AI applications rely on today. Developers can now deploy Cosmos DB in Fabric in just a few clicks to build high-performance, distributed applications with ease. You can try Cosmos DB in Fabric today.

Organizations are under pressure to unify fragmented data estates and deliver insights faster than ever. Whether you're modernizing on-premises systems or building AI-powered applications, mirroring into Microsoft Fabric simplifies integration, enhances resilience, and accelerates time-to-insight across your entire data estate. We recently announced the preview of mirroring for Azure Database for PostgreSQL and Azure SQL Database behind a firewall. We are now excited to announce mirroring for all in-market versions of SQL Server from SQL Server 2016 to SQL Server 2022. And, with the preview announcement for SQL Server 2025, we are also announcing preview of mirroring for SQL Server 2025 in Fabric.

Azure databases are the foundation for AI innovation

Scalable, resilient, and secure data is the cornerstone of breakthrough AI innovation and Azure databases are built with the enterprise-grade performance modern apps demand. Whether you're supporting millions of users across a global SaaS platform or training intelligent models on real-time data, Azure’s fully managed database services provide the foundation to move fast without compromising trust or uptime. With built-in high availability, advanced threat protection, and elastic scalability, Azure databases empower organizations to innovate confidently and deliver intelligent, data-driven experiences at enterprise scale.

Join us at Microsoft Build from May 19 to 22, 2025 to see all these announcements in action across the following sessions: