By the time you read this, I’m guessing the big #MSIgnite announcements were yesterday. You can use that hashtag to find most of the posts on social media.
And there were many, very cool, announcements! Let me quickly take you through my favourites.
Databases!
As I still love the DBA work, announcing SQL Server 2025 was a big one. I really like the new developments and new features. You can read my blog about that here.
Read more from the official announcement here.
Keeping in line with the DBA work, the second big one is the announcement of SQL databases in Microsoft Fabric. Either for your OLTP workloads, your metadata storage for the ETL process and/or your data warehouse. A lot of options to explore! Click here to learn more!
Fabric SKU
Then, not really explicitly mentioned but not to be missed is the new SKU estimator. We already had one in Excel that gave some hints on what to expect but it was hard to use. Microsoft listened and created a new one. As a MVP, I had the opportunity to try it out and provide feedback some time ago. Now it’s your turn to do the same! Click here for more info on providing feedback
AI Foundry
Finally something that is a little further away from me, then again something that is very close to what my coworkers work with. AI Foundry, to new name for Azure AI Studio. Besides a new name there’s a full SDK available. As it can integrate with Microsoft Fabric (at least I saw the logo featured prominent during the announcement) it will impact my work. This is one thing I won’t become an expert in but need to know how it works. More info here.
Everything AI?
It won’t be a huge surprise, AI is coming for us. It’s here to help us work faster. And it has some very cool features like Github Copilot being able to review code for you. Click here to read more.
The key here is to remain critical. Think about the results, evaluate them and, when in doubt, find a safe space to run it in before you break anything that you care about.
Is that all?
No, there were many more Fabric announcements like the Onelake Catalog, Azure SQL database mirroring generally available, Open mirroring and the Graph API. All very good stuff worth mentioning but not my top ones.
And of course there were a lot of announcements outside the data space, click here for the entire book of news.
What do you think?
I’m curious to know what you think of all the announcements. Any favourites or things you missed? Let me know in the comments!
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