What's New in SQL Server 2022 and 2025

53.1 SQL Server 2022 (Compatibility Level 160)

Link to Azure SQL Managed Instance, Azure Synapse Link, Microsoft Purview integration, Entra ID authentication

IQP NextGen: PSP optimization, DOP feedback, CE feedback, memory grant percentile and persistence, optimized plan forcing

Query Store on by default, Query Store hints, Query Store on secondary replicas

Ordered clustered columnstore, buffer pool parallel scan, system page latch concurrency (tempdb GAM/SGAM)

Integrated acceleration and offloading (Intel QAT backup compression)

Contained availability groups, distributed AG improvements, multi-write replication improvements

T-SQL snapshot backup, backup/restore to S3-compatible storage

Ledger, Always Encrypted with secure enclaves (VBS), granular permissions and new server roles, TDS 8.0 / TLS 1.3, MFA via Entra ID T-SQL language

GREATEST, LEAST, DATE_BUCKET, DATETRUNC, GENERATE_SERIES, STRING_SPLIT with ordinal, LTRIM/RTRIM/TRIM with characters

IS [NOT] DISTINCT FROM, WINDOW clause, IGNORE NULLS/RESPECT NULLS

APPROX_PERCENTILE_CONT/DISC, JSON_OBJECT, JSON_ARRAY, ISJSON type constraints, JSON_PATH_EXISTS

Bit manipulation: LEFT_SHIFT, RIGHT_SHIFT, BIT_COUNT, GET_BIT, SET_BIT

Resumable add table constraints, CREATE STATISTICS... WITH AUTO_DROP Data virtualization

PolyBase REST-based connectors (S3, ADLS, Azure Blob), CETAS, Parquet and Delta support

53.2 SQL Server 2025 (Compatibility Level 170)

AI built in VECTOR data type, VECTOR_DISTANCE, VECTOR_NORM, VECTOR_NORMALIZE, DiskANN vector indexes and VECTOR_SEARCH

CREATE EXTERNAL MODEL, AI_GENERATE_EMBEDDINGS, AI_GENERATE_CHUNKS (works with Azure OpenAI, OpenAI, Ollama, and others)

sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint for calling REST and AI services Copilot in SSMS Developer features

Native JSON data type, JSON index, JSON_CONTAINS, JSON_OBJECTAGG, JSON_ARRAYAGG

Regular expressions: REGEXP_LIKE, REGEXP_REPLACE, REGEXP_SUBSTR, REGEXP_INSTR, REGEXP_COUNT, REGEXP_MATCHES, REGEXP_SPLIT_TO_TABLE

Fuzzy matching: EDIT_DISTANCE, EDIT_DISTANCE_SIMILARITY, JARO_WINKLER_DISTANCE, JARO_WINKLER_SIMILARITY

|| string concatenation operator (with ||=), CURRENT_DATE, UNISTR, SUBSTRING with optional length, DATEADD with BIGINT, PRODUCT() aggregate, BASE64_ENCODE/BASE64_DECODE

Change event streaming to Azure Event Hubs / Kafka GraphQL support via Data API builder Performance and engine

Optimized locking (TID locking + lock after qualification)

Optional parameter plan optimization (OPPO), CE feedback for expressions, DOP feedback on by default

Batch-mode optimizations, ABORT_QUERY_EXECUTION query hint TempDB space resource governance, ADR for tempdb

Persisted statistics for readable secondaries ZSTD backup compression Availability and security

AG improvements: faster failover, fast failover for persistent health issues, backups on secondary replicas (full/diff)

Managed identity support (Arc-enabled), stronger PBKDF2 password hashing, TDS 8.0 defaults Fabric mirroring support Editions and licensing

Express edition max database size raised to 50 GB Standard edition limits raised (up to 32 cores / 256 GB memory)

Standard Developer and Enterprise Developer editions Retired/deprecated: Data Quality Services, Master Data Services, Synapse Link; SSRS replaced by Power BI Report Server

Always check the official Microsoft "What's new" docs. Preview features change between CUs.