Summary
Microsoft released SQL Server 2025 on 18 November 2025.
Key licensing changes:
Power BI Report Server included with SQL Server 2025 Standard and Enterprise core licences (no SA requirement). If you’re on SQL Server 2022 or earlier, the old rules still apply: Enterprise with active SA only, and the right expires when SA expires.
Web edition discontinued. There is no SQL Server 2025 Web. SQL Server 2022 Web remains supported until January 2033.
Fail-over rights disappeared from the November Product Terms, then reappeared in December after we raised the alarm.
Beyond the licensing changes, SQL Server 2025 expands technical capabilities across AI, developer tooling, and edition limits. Native vector search, built-in AI model integration, and REST API support are now in the database engine. Developers get native JSON support, regular expressions, and fuzzy string matching in T-SQL. Standard edition receives capacity increases and features previously restricted to Enterprise.
Power BI Report Server
Bringing Power BI Report Server to SQL Server Standard is genuinely good news. Since its launch, Power BI Report Server has required either SQL Server Enterprise edition with active Software Assurance, Power BI Premium capacity (P SKUs), or more recently Fabric F64+ reserved instances. For organisations that just wanted on-premises reporting without committing to Enterprise pricing or Premium capacity, there was no lower-cost option.
With SQL Server 2025, Microsoft has removed both restrictions. Power BI Report Server is now included with Standard edition, not just Enterprise. And Software Assurance is no longer required. If you have SQL Server 2025 Standard or Enterprise core licences, you have the right to run Power BI Report Server.
Before you start planning your deployment, there’s an important caveat. The new rights apply only to SQL Server 2025 licences. If you hold SQL Server 2022 or earlier licences, the old restrictions remain in force. The Product Terms now include two distinct rules depending on your licence version.
SQL Server 2025 (Standard or Enterprise core licences): | SQL Server 2022 and earlier: |
|---|---|
“With SQL Server 2025, Customer may run Power BI Report Server software on the Licensed Server, on any allowed Fail-over OSE in accordance with those same limits, or in Azure. Customer may run the software on a maximum numbers of cores equal to the number of SQL Server Standard or Enterprise Edition Core Licenses assigned to the Licensed Server, subject to a minimum of four core licenses per OSE.” No Software Assurance requirement is stated. Standard edition is explicitly included alongside Enterprise. | “For versions of SQL Server Enterprise Edition released prior to 2025, Power BI Report Server use rights apply only to Enterprise Edition Core Licenses with active SA. This right expires upon expiration of Customer’s SA coverage.” If you have SQL Server 2022 (or earlier) Enterprise licences with active SA, you can upgrade to SQL Server 2025 and gain the new Power BI Report Server rights. But if your SA has expired, or you have perpetual licences without SA, or you have Standard edition, the old restrictions apply to your licensed version. You don’t retroactively gain Power BI Report Server rights on SQL Server 2022 Standard just because SQL Server 2025 includes them. |
A Power BI Pro User SL is still required to publish shared reports, regardless of version.
The Case of the Missing Fail-over Rights
When Microsoft published the updated SQL Server Product Terms on 18 November 2025, the entire fail-over rights section had vanished.
For context, fail-over rights are a Software Assurance benefit that allows customers to run passive SQL Server instances for high availability and disaster recovery without additional licences. One fail-over OSE for HA, two for DR (one on-premises, one in Azure). The section has been in the Product Terms for years. And then it wasn’t.
We raised the alarm. Peter van Uden, who was at Ignite in person, spoke directly with Microsoft. Shortly after, the section reappeared in the December update. Microsoft has not publicly acknowledged the error.
In fixing the problem, Microsoft also added the fail-over rights language to the MCA Product Terms. Curious, since MCA customers cannot purchase Software Assurance, and the fail-over rights explicitly require SA. The section states: “These fail-over rights require SA for both the Licensed Server and CALs, if any.”
Fail-over rights depend on the licensing model: Software Assurance for perpetual licences, or SA-equivalent rights under SQL Server subscription licences.
So the MCA perpetual licence page now contains a Software Assurance section. MCA does not have Software Assurance. It’s not a concept that exists in MCA at all.
To add to the confusion: MCA customers do have fail-over rights if they purchased SQL Server subscription licences rather than perpetual licences. Those are governed by a separate page (Server Subscriptions for Azure), which grants SA-equivalent rights including fail-over, disaster recovery, License Mobility, and unlimited virtualisation during the subscription term. That’s always been the case.
The oddity here is pasting SA benefits into the perpetual licence terms where they don’t belong. Presumably the error will be tidied up in a future update.
Web Edition Discontinued
There will be no SQL Server 2025 Web edition. The licensing guidance states: “SQL Server Web edition is not available for 2025, however SQL Server 2022 Web edition may be available under the Microsoft Services Provider License Agreement (SPLA).”
SQL Server 2022 Web edition remains supported until January 2033 under Microsoft’s fixed lifecycle policy. Microsoft has not announced an end date for SPLA availability of SQL Server 2022 Web.
Microsoft’s GA announcement suggests two alternatives: Azure SQL Database (elastic pools for multi-tenant applications) or Standard edition for on-premises and Azure VM deployments. Both are substantially more expensive, so it’s not a like-for-like replacement.
For SPLA partners and hosting providers who built offerings around Web edition’s lower price point, the options are continuing with SQL Server 2022 Web (supported until 2033, SPLA availability unspecified beyond that) or accepting the higher cost of Standard edition for SQL Server 2025.
Feature and Capacity Updates
SQL Server 2025 brings capacity increases and feature availability changes across editions. Microsoft’s technical documentation and GA announcement describe the details.
Standard Edition
Standard edition receives the most significant capacity increases in this release.
Limit | SQL Server 2022 | SQL Server 2025 |
|---|---|---|
Maximum cores | Lesser of 4 sockets or 24 cores | Lesser of 4 sockets or 32 cores |
Buffer pool memory | 128 GB | 256 GB |
The core limit increase from 24 to 32 gives organisations a third more compute capacity within Standard edition. Those hitting the ceiling previously had one option: Enterprise pricing. Now they have headroom.
The buffer pool memory increase from 128 GB to 256 GB has similar implications. Databases that required Enterprise edition purely for memory capacity may now fit within Standard edition limits. Given the price difference between Standard and Enterprise core licences, that’s a substantial cost reduction for memory-intensive workloads that don’t need other Enterprise features.
Resource Governor is now available in Standard edition. Previously Enterprise-only, it allows workload isolation by setting limits on CPU, I/O, and memory per application or user group.
Express Edition
Express edition maximum database size increases from 10 GB to 50 GB per database. This fivefold increase addresses one of the most common limitations that pushed small deployments toward paid editions.
Express with Advanced Services (which included Full-Text Search, Reporting Services, and Advanced Analytics) has been consolidated into the base Express edition. All Express installations now include these capabilities without requiring a separate SKU.
Developer Editions
Developer editions now include two variants. Both are licensed solely for development, testing, and demonstration purposes. Neither can be used in production.
Enterprise Developer edition is equivalent to the previous Developer edition, with all Enterprise features.
Standard Developer edition is new in SQL Server 2025. It includes all Standard edition features with Standard edition limitations (the 32-core cap, 256 GB memory limit, no unlimited virtualisation). Development teams can now build and test against the actual constraints of their production Standard edition environment, rather than developing on Enterprise Developer and discovering limitations at deployment.
Standard Developer edition solves a real problem. Previously, some teams used Visual Studio subscription rights to deploy actual Standard edition in development environments. Perfectly legal, but risky. DevOps might accidentally deploy the same instance to production, violating the Visual Studio subscription terms. During audits, you’d have to explain why Standard edition was running on developer machines, produce evidence of Visual Studio subscriptions for those users, and demonstrate the instances weren’t serving production workloads. Standard Developer edition sidesteps all of that: it’s clearly a development SKU, it can’t accidentally become production (unless your licence management is completely non-existent), and auditors understand what they’re looking at.
Licensing Models
The licensing models themselves haven’t changed in SQL Server 2025. If you’re familiar with SQL Server licensing, you already know how to license SQL Server 2025.
Per Core licensing applies to both Enterprise and Standard editions. You count the physical cores in the server (minimum 4 per processor, sold in 2-packs) and buy that many core licences. If you have Software Assurance or subscription licences, you can license by virtual cores instead (minimum 4 per VM), and Enterprise edition with SA gets unlimited virtualisation on a fully licensed host.
Server + CAL licensing remains available for Standard edition only. One server licence per server, plus a CAL for each user or device accessing SQL Server. Server + CAL is not available with pay-as-you-go billing through Azure Arc.
Software Assurance and subscription licences continue to provide the additional rights they always have: fail-over rights for HA and DR, License Mobility for authorised outsourcers, Azure Hybrid Benefit, and unlimited containers when licensing virtual OSEs.
The SQL Server licensing guidance has been updated for 2025 and remains the authoritative reference for detailed scenarios.
Technical Features
The following technical capabilities are documented in Microsoft’s What’s New page and GA announcement.
AI and Vector Search
SQL Server 2025 integrates AI capabilities directly into the database engine. Not a bolt-on or external service; vector operations run within SQL Server itself.
SQL Server 2025 allows vector search and AI model integration to run directly inside the database engine, without external services.
Vector data type and DiskANN indexing: SQL Server 2025 introduces a native vector data type for storing embeddings. DiskANN (Disk-based Approximate Nearest Neighbour) indexing enables efficient similarity search across vector data. Semantic search, recommendation systems, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) patterns can now be implemented within the database.
Built-in AI model integration: The engine supports connections to AI models through Microsoft Foundry, Azure OpenAI Service, OpenAI, Ollama, and other providers. Model management is handled through T-SQL, allowing developers to switch between models without changing application code.
Text chunking and embedding generation: Native functions for chunking text and generating embeddings are included, supporting the preprocessing steps required for RAG implementations.
If you’re building AI applications, the database itself can now handle vector storage, similarity search, and model invocation. Data doesn’t need to leave the database for embedding generation or semantic retrieval, which simplifies architecture and may address data residency requirements.
Developer Features
Native JSON support: SQL Server 2025 introduces native JSON as a data type, not just functions for parsing JSON strings. The implementation includes JSON path expressions, indexing, and schema validation. Applications that store JSON documents can now do so with proper type support rather than treating JSON as varchar.
REST APIs: The sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint stored procedure allows SQL Server to make HTTP calls to external REST APIs directly from T-SQL. Integration patterns that previously required middleware or application code can now run in the database.
Regular expressions: T-SQL now supports regular expression functions for pattern matching, replacing, and extraction. A long-standing gap compared to other database platforms, finally closed.
Fuzzy string matching: Built-in functions for approximate string matching support scenarios like name matching, deduplication, and search where exact matches are insufficient.
Change event streaming: Changes can be streamed directly from the transaction log to Azure Event Hubs in real time. An alternative to Change Data Capture (CDC) with lower resource overhead, supporting event-driven architectures and real-time data pipelines.
Performance and Reliability
Optimised locking: A new locking mechanism reduces lock memory consumption and blocking. Microsoft’s documentation indicates improved concurrency for high-throughput transactional workloads.
Tempdb space resource governance: Administrators can set limits on tempdb space consumption per session or workload group. Runaway queries consuming all tempdb space and affecting other workloads, a common cause of production incidents, can now be prevented.
Optional Parameter Plan Optimisation (OPPO): The query optimiser can generate multiple plans for queries with optional parameters, reducing parameter sniffing issues. A class of performance problems that previously required query hints or plan guides now has a built-in solution.
Persisted statistics on secondary replicas: Statistics can now be persisted on Always On secondary replicas, improving query performance after failover events.
Security
Microsoft Entra ID integration: SQL Server 2025 supports Microsoft Entra managed identities for authentication, improving credential management in hybrid environments.
TLS 1.3: Transport Layer Security 1.3 is now supported, including on Linux deployments.
Cloud Integration
Mirroring in Fabric: SQL Server 2025 can mirror databases to Microsoft Fabric for near real-time analytics. This zero-ETL approach replicates data continuously, allowing analytical workloads to run in Fabric without building and maintaining separate data pipelines.
Azure Arc integration: SQL Server enabled by Azure Arc provides unified management, security, and governance across on-premises and cloud deployments. Pay-as-you-go billing is available for Arc-enabled instances.
Reporting Services Consolidation
SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is not included in SQL Server 2025. Power BI Report Server replaces it as the default on-premises reporting solution.
SSRS 2022 remains supported until January 2033 and can still connect to the SQL Server 2025 database engine for its report catalogue. Organisations currently using SSRS can continue with their existing SSRS 2022 installation while running SQL Server 2025 databases.
The consolidation means that Power BI Report Server now handles both paginated reports (the traditional SSRS RDL format) and interactive Power BI reports in a single platform. Migration from SSRS to Power BI Report Server is documented in Microsoft’s Reporting Services consolidation FAQ.
Discontinued Features
Several features are discontinued in SQL Server 2025:
Data Quality Services (DQS): No longer included. Supported in SQL Server 2022 and earlier.
Master Data Services (MDS): No longer included. Supported in SQL Server 2022 and earlier.
Synapse Link: Replaced by Mirroring in Fabric.
Purview access policies: DevOps policies and data owner policies are discontinued.
PolyBase scale-out groups: The scale-out capability is removed; PolyBase itself continues.
Machine Learning Services (Python and R): Discontinued. Microsoft recommends Azure Machine Learning or running ML workloads outside the database engine.
SQL Server is one of the most important building blocks of IT, and it has historically been one of the most complicated products to license. Considering its cost, especially of the Enterprise edition, and tens of licensing combinations, finding the most cost-efficient and compliant one isn’t easy.
Get in touch if you need help. We don’t sell Microsoft licences or cloud services, so our advice is independent.