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Applies to: 
Azure SQL Database
This article summarizes the documentation changes associated with new features and improvements in the recent releases of Azure SQL Database. For more information about Azure SQL Database, see What is Azure SQL Database?
Tip
Deploy Azure SQL Database for free, for the life of your Azure subscription. This free offer provides up to ten free General Purpose databases, each with 100,000 vCore seconds of compute, every month.
For more announcements, discussion, and community content, see the Azure SQL Database blog.
Preview
The following table lists the features of Azure SQL Database that are currently in preview.
Note
Features currently in preview are available under supplemental terms of use, review for legal terms that apply to Azure features that are in beta, preview, or otherwise not yet released into general availability. Azure SQL Database provides previews to give you a chance to evaluate and share feedback with the product group on features before they become generally available (GA).
| Feature | Details |
|---|---|
| Approximate or fuzzy string matching | Check if two strings are similar, and calculate the difference between two strings. Use this capability to identify strings that might be different because of character corruption. What is fuzzy string matching? |
| Availability metric | Availability is now a metric in the Azure Monitor metrics. Driven by a variety of user connection failures, you can monitor and configure alerts on Azure SQL Database Availability. |
| Change event streaming | Capture and publish incremental DML changes of data (such as updates, inserts, and deletes) in near real-time. Change event streaming sends details of data changes such as the schema, previous values, and new values to Azure Event Hubs in a simple CloudEvent, serialized as either native JSON or Avro Binary. To learn more, review Change event streaming. |
| DATEADD number allows bigint | For DATEADD (datepart, number, date), number can be expressed as a bigint. For more information, see DATEADD (Transact-SQL). |
| Database watcher for Azure SQL | Database watcher is a managed monitoring solution for database services in the Azure SQL family. Database watcher collects in-depth workload monitoring data to give you a detailed view of database performance, configuration, and health. Learn more about database watcher. |
| Data Virtualization for Azure SQL Database | Data virtualization, now in preview in Azure SQL Database, enables you to leverage all the power of Transact-SQL (T-SQL) and seamlessly query external data from Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 or Azure Blob Storage. For more information, see Data virtualization with Azure SQL Database (Preview). |
| Elastic queries | The elastic queries feature allows for cross-database queries in Azure SQL Database. |
| Elastic transactions | Elastic transactions allow you to execute transactions distributed among cloud databases in Azure SQL Database. |
| Fixed server roles | To simplify permission management, Azure SQL Database provides a set of fixed server-level roles to help you manage the permissions on a logical server. |
| Immutable LTR backups | You can configure long-term retention backups of Azure SQL Database as immutable with legal hold immutability (preview feature). Time-based backup immutability is generally available. |
| Import and export using managed identity | You can import or export an Azure SQL Database BACPAC file with managed identity authentication. Use managed identity authentication for enhanced security when importing or exporting databases. |
| Import and export using Private Link | You can import or export an Azure SQL Database using private link. Leave Allow Access to Azure Services off when you import or export a database using a service-managed endpoint. |
| Microsoft Entra server principals | The ability to create server principals (logins) for Microsoft Entra identities in Azure SQL Database is in preview. |
| Multiple geo-replicas for Hyperscale | The ability to create up to four geo-replicas for Azure SQL Hyperscale is in preview. Learn more about multiple geo-replicas for Hyperscale. |
| Network Security Perimeter | Azure Network Security Perimeter allows organizations to define a logical network isolation boundary for PaaS resources (for example, Azure Storage and SQL Database) that are deployed outside your organization's virtual networks. It restricts public network access to PaaS resources outside of the perimeter, and access can be exempted by using explicit access rules for public inbound and outbound. |
| Query editor in the Azure portal | The query editor in the Azure portal allows you to run queries against your Azure SQL Database directly from a web browser. |
| Restart database in the Azure portal | You can restart your SQL database or elastic pool from the Azure portal. |
| Multiple secondaries for failover groups | You can configure multiple secondary servers for failover groups in Azure SQL Database. |
General availability (GA)
The following table lists features of Azure SQL Database that have been made generally available (GA) within the last 12 months:
| Feature | GA Month | Details |
|---|---|---|
| Regular expression functions | November 2025 | Regular expression (REGEX) functions return text based on values in a search pattern. Regular expressions. |
| Immutable LTR backups | November 2025 | You can configure long-term retention backups of Azure SQL Database as immutable with time-based immutability. |
| Convert to Hyperscale with geo-replicas | October 2025 | The ability to convert a geo-replicated database non-Hyperscale database to Hyperscale using T-SQL, REST API, PowerShell, or Azure CLI is now generally available. For more information, see Blog: Hyperscale conversion support for geo-replicas. |
| ABORT_QUERY_EXECUTION | October 2025 | The ABORT_QUERY_EXECUTION query hint can block future execution of known problematic queries, for example nonessential queries causing high resource consumption and impacting critical application workloads. For more information, see Query Store hints: Block future execution of problematic queries. |
| sys.dm_hs_database_replicas | August 2025 | You can query the details of Azure SQL Database Hyperscale replicas with the new dynamic management view (DMV) sys.dm_hs_database_replicas. |
| UNISTR (Transact-SQL) | July 2025 | Azure SQL Database now supports the UNISTR T-SQL syntax for Unicode string literals. For more information, see UNISTR (Transact-SQL). |
| || (String concatenation) and ||= (Compound assignment) syntax support | July 2025 | Azure SQL Database now supports || (String concatenation) and ||= (Compound assignment) Transact-SQL syntax. |
| Degrees of Parallelism (DOP) feedback | July 2025 | DOP Feedback is now generally available for Azure SQL Database. For more information, see Smarter Parallelism: Degree of parallelism feedback in SQL Server 2025. |
| Audit re-architecture | July 2025 | Increased availability and reliability of server audits through a re-architecture of auditing in Azure SQL Database that is closely aligned with SQL Server and Azure SQL Managed Instance. For more information, see Auditing. |
| Vector data type and functions | June 2025 | Working with vector data is now easier in Azure SQL Database with the introduction of a new vector data type and vector functions. For more information, see Intelligent applications with Azure SQL Database. |
| Hyperscale increased log generation rate | May 2025 | The transaction log generation rate in Azure SQL Database Hyperscale single databases has been increased from 100 MiB/s to 150 MiB/s for premium-series and premium-series memory optimized hardware. For more information, read Blog: Enhancements to Azure SQL Database Hyperscale. |
| Hyperscale continuous priming | May 2025 | Continuous priming optimizes Hyperscale performance during failovers by priming high availability secondary compute replicas. Continuous priming is now generally available. For more information, read Blog: Enhancements to Azure SQL Database Hyperscale. |
| JSON native data type | May 2025 | The json data type and JSON aggregate functions provide new capabilities for handling semistructured data in Azure SQL Database. |
| JSON aggregate functions | May 2025 | Two json aggregate functions JSON_OBJECTAGG and JSON_ARRAYAGG enable construction of JSON objects or arrays based on an aggregate from SQL data. |
| Copilot in Microsoft Azure with SQL Database | April 2025 | Copilot in Azure with Azure SQL Database is a capability of the Microsoft Copilot in Azure experience that enhances the management and operation of Azure services, providing robust capabilities for SQL-dependent applications. |
| Manually initiate cutover for conversion to Hyperscale | April 2025 | When converting an Azure SQL Database to the Hyperscale service tier, you have a new option to manually initiate the cutover. For more information, see Convert an existing database to Hyperscale. |
Documentation changes
Learn about significant changes to the Azure SQL Database documentation. For previous years, see the What's new archive.
March 2026
| Changes | Details |
|---|---|
| Import and export using managed identity preview | You can import or export an Azure SQL Database BACPAC file with managed identity authentication. Use managed identity authentication for enhanced security when importing or exporting databases. This capability is currently in preview for Azure SQL Database. |
January 2026
| Changes | Details |
|---|---|
| Multiple secondaries for failover groups | You can configure multiple secondary servers for failover groups in Azure SQL Database. |
Archive
For previous updates, see the What's new archive.
Contribute to content
To contribute to the Azure SQL documentation, see the Docs contributor guide.