I’m guessing you’ve seen posts, blogs and social media activity in the last year on both Fabric SQL databases and rumours around SQL Server 2025.
Today, Microsoft announced that both of these are Generally Available (GA). This means it’s now fully supported by Microsoft. You can read all about this, and more, in the Ignite 2025 Book of News!
SQL Server 2025
You may have seen earlier blogs from me on SQL Server 2025; I won’t repeat that content in full, but I’ll provide a brief summary. You can find the full blogs here.
Something I wasn’t able to mention before, but you can now find in the documentation, is that SQL Server Express has upgraded its game! No longer a limit of 10 GB for the database, but 50 GB. This makes it much more useful in many scenarios.
Also, Standard Edition has gotten some features from Enterprise Edition. Check out the documentation for the complete comparison.
For me, the main features are the introduction of Developer Standard Edition, Regular Expressions, the time-bound extended events, and the new backup compression.
Developer Standard Edition
As long as I’m a member of the SQL Family, I’ve heard people mutter that SQL Server Developer Edition is very cool, because it’s free (not for production use!), but can trip you up in development because you always get all the Enterprise Edition features. No matter how cool they are, if the rest of your SQL estate runs on Standard Edition, you may be in for a few surprises.
This is now, finally, solved with Standard Edition. This means that you can develop your code on the same feature set as the rest of your SQL estate. Excellent work!
Regular Expressions
Regular expressions can be a significant help when looking for specific data. Or when validating data. Now that it’s incorporated inside SQL Server, we can leverage the functionality and make the transformation part of our ETL process easier. The last time I tested was in a release candidate, and the performance wasn’t where I had hoped it would be. Let’s see if the team was able to make some adjustments leading up to the GA version.
Time-bound extended events
In essence, when you create an extended event, you can now tell it to stop after a specific amount of time. Just like you could using profiler.
Backup compression
This is particularly cool when you’re a DBA in need of both faster backups and those that use up less space. The addition of the ZSTD algorithm enables this. I’ve tried it out and was very impressed. From what I’ve heard, I’m not the only one who really likes this feature.
Management Studio
I also want to mention that, with SQL Server 2025, SQL Server Management Studio 22 was released. A perfect fit for this version, and it includes the GitHub Copilot experience.
Fabric SQL Database
In essence, this is your Azure SQL database, made available within Fabric. With limitations. Why limitations? As a DBA, I prefer to have control over as many aspects of a database as possible. With this, I can set the name. And that’s about it. The database is created and available within seconds, allowing me to create tables, procedures, and other objects.
If you’re not a DBA and you’re looking for a database to get started as quickly as possible, this is a perfect solution! All you have to think about is the name and you’re off.
It has an excellent use case for metadata of your Fabric Analytics solution.
Learn more!
Now, it’s also time for you to put on your learning hat and delve into all the information that has been made available.
Reitse's blog 
In theory, Fabric SQL DB is the perfect metadata repository for your analytics solution. If it wouldn’t consume nearly an entire F4 when you’re querying a 12 row table…
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