SQL Server 2025 was released this week. The announcement came at Ignite and the PASS Data Community Summit with keynotes on Wednesday and Thursday, respectively. While there are some things to look forward to in the release (What's New) and some highlights from T-SQL Tuesday this week, it seems that this release wasn't a very exciting one.

On one hand, I blame all the Microsoft Fabric focus, which seems to distract from the core product that powers the databases at many organizations.  The SQL Server blog from Microsoft has had relatively few posts this year, highlighting a few things. The Fabric blog gets more posts, which is something I've seen at Database Weekly as well. As I curate the content during my week, I find a lot more Fabric-focused content than SQL Server-specific posts. That contributes to a lack of excitement for a new version of SQL Server.

On the other hand, SQL Server is a very mature product and most of us use it daily, depend on it, and feel comfortable with the way it works. While some of us want changes, bugs fixed or features enhanced, for the most part, I find many clients expect it to just work and don't have time to refactor code to use new features. A few also are nervous about using features until they've been in a few versions, as we sometimes see features released with limited functionality and few enhancements (*cough* these tables *cough* or these ones).

At the same time, the What's New page has a lot of stuff listed. If not more than SQL Server 2022 and 2019, it's in more categories. Maybe it's just that the documentation writers are more verbose? Perhaps, but I see lots of things I hadn't noticed before in announcements. RegEx and the AI capabilities have dominated a lot of the news/blogs/etc., but the Change event streaming, native support for parquet/Delta, AG control flow, backup on secondaries, ADR for tempdb, and more are there. Plus, quite a few security enhancements to let us work with managed identities.

When I really look at the product, there are things to be excited about, probably at least a couple for most people. At the same time, it has seemed like many people, including me, aren't necessarily overly excited about upgrading systems to a new version when much of our code won't change.

Maybe because no one lets us, or gives us time to, change code to use new features.