Steve Jones has asked us to talk about what is exciting in SQL 2025 for this months TSQL Tuesday. I’ll do that, but I’m also going to cheat a little, because the thing that I think is going to have the biggest impact is not in SQL 2025, it’s in SSMS.

But just so I’m answering the question – I really like that Arc Enabled SQL Servers are going to have the ability to use Managed Identities. That makes integration into a wider Azure infrastructure just a little bit easier. One of the implications of cloud computing is that many of the great scalability and convenience options we have had opened up to us come with a series of tricky hoops to jump through in order to be able to leverage them. These hoops require a DBA either to have more rights than a DBA should have in the tenancy or rely on someone else. DBA’s don’t much like relying on someone else, but we’re also a bit twitchy about being given excessive rights to stuff we don’t normally touch, because we know from experience than when you give rights to someone who knows enough to be dangerous…..disaster ensues at some point. This integration removes some of these hoops by allowing simplified authentication against other Azure resources.

But I actually want to derail the original question, or at least to expand it a little to talk about the upcoming change in SSMS Version 22 which is introducing Github copilot integration.

I thought I’d give this a whirl and was really impressed. For a start they have nailed context. Copilot operates on your active window and has all of the context of that window. Specifically it knows what database and server you are connected to and can answer questions about them, or tailor answers to what is going on there. I’ve had an initial first play and I am still at the “This is so cool” point which occurs when you start using a new feature and before you start hitting the “Why can’t it do this too” stage. I’m sure there will be multiple examples of things it doesn’t quite do yet, but it’s great to see it in there and is going to open up a lot of opportunities for some rapid TSQL development and tuning.

I’ve honestly never downloaded a new version of SSMS faster. Now give me back the old icon and you’ll have a completely happy customer. 😉