Blog Post
New Microsoft Certified: SQL AI Developer Associate Certification
Thanks for sharing this certification announcement!
I’m currently preparing for DP-800 / SQL AI Developer Associate and wanted to share a small local lab I built to practice some of the SQL Server AI scenarios from Microsoft Learn without relying on cloud model calls.
The lab runs with Docker Compose and includes SQL Server 2025 Express, Ollama, nginx HTTPS, WSL 2, NVIDIA GPU/CUDA support, embeddings, vector search, DiskANN, and a simple RAG example.
It includes labs for:
- Setup and HTTPS validation
- Completions with sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint
- Embeddings with AI_GENERATE_EMBEDDINGS
- Chunking with AI_GENERATE_CHUNKS
- Semantic search with VECTOR_DISTANCE
- DiskANN vector index and ANN search with VECTOR_SEARCH
- Basic RAG using SQL Server as the retrieval layer
Repo:
https://github.com/mainlyer/dp-800-sql-ai-dev-local-lab
I hope it helps other people preparing for DP-800 or experimenting with the new SQL Server AI capabilities.
Happy learning!