SQLBits 2026 Day 1

 

 

SQLBits in Wales is happenig this week. We have held the conference at the ICC before so all very familiar.  The keynote was introduced by Simon Sabin before it moved into an in-depth session on the future of Microsoft One SQL—from on-premises to Azure and into Microsoft Fabric. It develved into the unified, AI-ready relational database that powers modernization and next-gen AI apps. SQL  delivers consistency, performance, and some innovative features. The speakers in the keynote were Bob Ward, Anna Hoffman, Priya Sathy, Shiva Gurumurthy.

Data and AI is changing the world. It is the fuel that powers AI.  Microsoft SQL is one consistent SQL for the era of AI. It is

enterprise ready, has evolved over the decades to an industry leading scaleable, dynamic platform with high availability and  best in class price performance. 

The keynote develved into migrate and modernize , the need for cloud native AI apps and the need for unified data platforms. 

Highlights of new features 

Azure SQL Server Managed Instance GA

SQL Server 2025 on Azure Virtual Machine GA

Azure Accelerate for Databases announced

aka.ms/modernizedatabases

Azure SQL Database Hyperscale GA you only pay for cores and storage and no license fee.

Mirroring from Microsoft SQL to Fabric GA

SQL Database in Fabric GA

Database Hub in Fabric was announced with fleet management,  observability and database agents.

The depth and breadth of SQL Server has grown substantially over the years and supports many engine types for holistic use. The engines being graph, vector,  columnar, document, spacial, key value, heirachical, in memory and ledger.

Many sessions today develed into SQL migrations in various forms. There was a fun session talking about Databricks vs Fabric. There are many differences and business needs and business technology stack skills in house often influence the choic of technology.

The Azure SQLServer Hyperscale session talked about Hyperscale which is about the architecture design,  not the engine. It is truly a distributed , cloud native architecture  with boundless storage that grows automatically with elastic compute at two speed. It uses sql server as caches.

More sessions for day 2 tomorrow.