Microsoft Unveils Major Upgrades to SQL Capabilities at SQLCon Barcelona

At SQLCon Barcelona 2026, Microsoft made significant announcements to advance SQL capabilities. The company's goal is to give customers greater control over their workloads, more room for applications to grow, and more intelligent tools for operating databases in the agentic era.

The first major announcement was the general availability of SQL Server on Azure Local for both connected and disconnected operations. This release brings the Azure control plane and management to customer-controlled environments, providing a consistent SQL and Azure experience for workloads that need to remain close to their applications, users, or physical operations. Connected deployments allow organizations to use Azure-based management while keeping workloads and data local, while Azure Local Disconnected Operations (ALDO) provides a local control plane for private sovereign environments.

Another key announcement was the extension of Azure SQL Database Hyperscale capabilities. The service now includes more compute options with 160 and 192 vCore Premium-series service objectives available, as well as more scale and better cost efficiency through hyperscale serverless auto-pause scales to zero and instantly resumes. Higher-density elastic pools are also in preview, providing cost efficiency to customers.

Microsoft also announced the general availability of Vector search with DiskANN vector indexes, which brings high-performance vector search to operational data. SQL's vector index now has full DML support, allowing users to modify data in vector-indexed tables while the index automatically stays updated in real-time.