Public Preview: Azure SQL updates for mid-March 2026

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.

Learn more:

• Auto index compaction
• Business continuity in Azure SQL Database
• Azure SQL Database Hyperscale Premium-series
• DiskAN Vector Index improvements