Ignite 2025: Microsoft boosts database capabilities for AI

Microsoft Ignite 2025 is here. The company made sure to highlight key developments relevant to the Microsoft Azure community. This year, one of Microsoft’s main focus areas remains AI agents. Major enterprises like NASDAQ, Pantone, and AlphaLife Sciences are leveraging Copilot and custom-built agents to optimize their workloads. 

“But critically, as Frontier Firms train new agents on their data, it’s become clear that the effectiveness of an agent isn’t just based on the size of the dataset, but on how well that data reflects the reality of your business. To provide valuable insights, make accurate predictions, and have a perspective on events, agents and the people who use them should be grounded in context like the relationships, hierarchies, and meaning that connect data to what’s happening in your organization,” Arun Ulag, president for Azure Data, explained in a statement.

A new database offering builds on PostgreSQL

Microsoft announced Azure HorizonDB as a new managed PostgreSQL-compatible database service, currently in-preview, designed to handle enterprise scale. The new offering is intended to be elastic, scalable, and tightly integrated with other Azure-native apps. 

To achieve these objectives, Microsoft included autoscaling storage up to 128TB, scale-out compute up to 3,072 vCores, and less than one millisecond multi-zone commit latency. HorizonDB also comes equipped with enterprise security and compliance, integrated AI model management, and pre-built vector search. According to Ulag, HorizonDB provides integrations with VS Code, GitHub Copilot, and Fabric. 

Modernizing SQL workloads

In its latest development for SQL, Microsoft made SQL Server 2025 generally available. Much like PostgreSQL, the latest iteration of SQL capabilities are geared toward AI. SQL Server 2025 retains the same T-SQL experience as in the past but provides semantic intelligence, AI model management, Foundry integration, and full-text filtering. 

Customers using SQL Server 2025 will be able to leverage Entra ID with Azure Arc. Data can be accessed rapidly from Microsoft OneLake.

Hybrid and multi-cloud takes center stage

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