As AI turns into extra accessible to the frequent individual on a regular basis, it additionally is sensible to implement a strong structure that helps AI options. To that finish, Microsoft has up to date its .NET and JDBC ecosystems to natively assist vector information sorts, guaranteeing high-performance environments for AI workloads.

On the subject of .NET, there’s a new Sqlvector class in Microsoft.Knowledge.SqlClient 6.1.0. That is able to dealing with information in a vector format, slightly than the beforehand used and inefficient JSON array format. In comparison with that, the vector kind improves efficiency by as much as 50 occasions in learn operations, 3.3x in write operations, and a 19x enhance in bulk copy operations. These efficiency assessments had been performed on SQL Server 2025 Preview with a vector column of max 1998 measurement, and 10,000 information for every
operation.

As well as, since JSON serialization shouldn’t be required anymore, there’s decrease reminiscence consumption too because of the absence of prolonged string illustration. Lastly, 32-bit floating-point vectors are natively supported proper now however there’s extensibility accessible for different numeric information sorts sooner or later too.

Switching over to the JDBC setting, we have now a brand new VECTOR information kind within the Microsoft JDBC driver for SQL Server 13.1.0. It may be immediately utilized in insertions, choose, saved procedures, and bulk copy. String-based vector dealing with has been eliminated on this model too, which makes it superb for integration with Java-powered AI functions, together with these providing semantic search.

It is very important observe that these enhancements are relevant on all kinds of platforms, together with SQL Server 2025 (17.x) Preview, Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Occasion, and SQL database in Microsoft Material Preview. It is usually value highlighting that these enhancements have been achieved by optimizations to the Tabular Knowledge Stream (TDS) protocol, so they may solely be seen on TDS model 7.4 or larger. Purchasers that do not assist this protocol will proceed to make use of the varchar(max) information kind and deal with the information as a JSON array for backward compatibility, which implies that they will not see any of the aforementioned enhancements.