I’m excited to share that I’ll be presenting at Boston Data and AI Saturday on October 3, 2026, hosted at the Microsoft Technology Center in Burlington, Massachusetts. It’s a free, community-run day of technical sessions covering SQL Server, AI, data engineering, analytics, and career growth — exactly the kind of event that keeps this community running.

My session: What’s New in SQL Server 2025

SQL Server 2025 reached general availability at Microsoft Ignite in November 2025, and it’s the most significant release for developers in years. I’ll be walking through the highlights, including:

• Native AI in the engine — vector data types, DiskANN-based vector indexes, and built-in support for semantic search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), with model connections to Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, OpenAI, and Ollama
• Big developer wins — a native JSON data type (up to 2GB per row) with JSON indexing, built-in regular expression support in T-SQL, and a native REST API via system stored procedures
• Fabric integration — mirroring with a change-feed capability that streams committed transaction log changes into Microsoft Fabric OneLake for near real-time analytics
• Performance and platform updates — optimized locking, tempdb resource governance, Copilot in SSMS 22, and a new high-performance Python driver

Whether you’re running SQL Server on-prem, in containers, or on Linux, there’s a lot here worth knowing before your next upgrade cycle.

Details

• 📅 Saturday, October 3, 2026
• 📍 Microsoft Technology Center, 5 Wayside Road, Burlington, MA
• 🎟️ Free — registration and full session list on the event page

If you’re in the Boston area, come say hi — I’d love to talk data, AI, or anything in between. Hope to see you there!