In mid-March 2026, the following updates and
enhancements were made to Azure SQL:
Reduce
the consumption of storage space, I/O, and memory and improve performance
without investing time and effort into index maintenance jobs.
Configure
soft delete retention for your Azure SQL Server to prevent accidental
deletion and self-restore in case of deletion.
Azure
SQL Database Hyperscale Premium‑series expands scalability with new 160
and 192 vCore options representing a 25% and 50%
increase respectively over the current 128 vCore limit, enabling
significantly larger compute and memory configurations for the most demanding
workloads.
DiskANN
for vector indexing and vector search has been
significantly improved, addressing previous constraints.
The vector index now supports fully real-time updates, integrated
pre-filtering and post-filtering, and improved memory efficiency at
scale through vector quantization. These advancements make it well
suited for operational retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG)
workloads.