What the Decline of Sql Server Quality means for Developers and DBAs

“Is it just me, or is SQL Server quality slipping?”

I asked myself that question for couple/few years until I faced up to it: SQL Server is well into a period where Microsoft investment is waning, and Microsoft regularly isn’t able to deliver the features they promise.

Feature Announcements ≠ Usable Features

Remember when folks waited for Service Pack 1 for SQL Server releases before trying a feature, because they weren’t sure about the quality?

We don’t have service packs anymore, but these days a lot of features wouldn’t even be available by Service Pack 3, much less Service Pack 1.

We are in an era when Microsoft announces features for SQL Server that they don’t deliver for years– or perhaps at all. For example, Query Store on readable secondaries was a SQL Server 2022 feature that we’ve still never seen in a production-ready state: it remains completely unavailable in Azure SQL offerings. It stays in a “preview” state that “is not intended for production deployments” in the boxed product years after the 2022 release.

Similarly, we saw other flagship features of SQL Server 2022, like the ability to fail over to Azure SQL Managed Instances, take years to crawl out of preview.

Azure SQL Managed Instance: Storage that Freezes for 60 Seconds

Azure SQL Managed Instance itself is one of the sharp indicators of a lack of Microsoft investment.

The General Purpose tier of Azure SQL has an incredibly bad storage latency problem– storage regularly stalls up to 60 seconds regardless of utilization or configuration patterns, and there’s nothing you can do as a user to prevent this.

That’s essentially downtime, and accepting this as “normal” in a hosted database product is, well, bizarre. Yet Microsoft can’t get the newer version of the storage, GPV2, over the line and out of preview after announcing it a year ago.

Lingering SQL Server Bugs are Piling Up, Long Unfixed

It’s more difficult than ever to get SQL Server bugs diagnosed and fixed.

Take the query hash bug—where SQL Server randomly replaces query_hash values, making performance tuning nearly impossible (source). This bug has been lurking for years and impacts SQL Server 2008 through the latest versions.

Similarly, SQL Server bugs with statistics with metadata errors that cause queries to fail on readable secondaries have been around since SQL Server 2012. There are a host of known problems with In-Memory Metadata for tempdb— which maybe is why it remains completely unavailable for Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance, it’s hard to say. And online index rebuilds aren’t always online.

And these are just the ones that I hit in a regular workday.

All Microsoft Roads Lead to Fabric

Looking in from the outside, it seems clear that Microsoft’s focus has shifted: when it comes to data, the priority is Microsoft Fabric.

Investment in data technologies are increasingly focused on the AI goldrush and quest to beat Databricks.

It also feels like Microsoft has, at an organizational level, decided that SQL Server doesn’t need to evolve much more. When is the last time you heard of a SQL Server feature that felt groundbreaking and innovative to you? From my external viewpoint, it seems like Azure SQL Database Hyperscale tried to take on AWS Aurora, and after a crowd of users didn’t materialize then product innovation sharply dwindled.

Will the pendulum swing back?

Honestly, in this case, I’m not sure.

I’m quite positive that Microsoft will keep releasing new versions of SQL Server and keep selling licenses for quite a long time. The product has a large enough user base and enough functionality that it will keep making money for years, even if it goes onto a full mode of quiet life support with only small features added and bug fixes released.

Will innovation and strong investment actually swing back to SQL Server, though? If this happens, I think it’s going to be a while.

What This Means for Developers and DBAs

So SQL Server is receiving limited investment: what does that mean to DBAs and Developers?

It doesn’t necessarily mean work is less interesting for database folks– I work with SQL Server databases every day, and I love my job. It remains fascinating and full of tough problems.

But Microsoft’s declining level of investment in SQL Server will change things for those of us who use the product:

You may adjust your technical focus, depending on where you are in your career path: For people earlier in their career cycle, this is a strong signal not to specialize only on SQL Server. If relational databases are your interest, work to get experience with multiple database platforms. Postgres is already common and will continue to grow its userbase.

Slowing upgrade trends: Mirosoft is still planning on releasing SQL Server 2025 (without having finished SQL Server 2022, arguably). The will still push users to upgrade and limit the number of versions they support. However, the pattern of not delivering promised features and the slow rate of addressing bugs means that users will be slower to upgrade services to new major versions. This will, in turn, probably mean users are slower to report new bugs, and the cycle will deepend and become even more sluggish.

You’ll need to be a squeakier wheel: The problem isn’t that no one at Microsoft cares about SQL Server—there are still engineers and product managers who genuinely want to improve it. The issue is that at a high leadership level, investment has shifted elsewhere. If nobody complains and we all seem quite happy to just keep paying for upgrades, why would that ever change? Microsoft prioritizes what makes the most noise internally, and that noise comes from signals—support tickets, customer escalations (particularly to sales teams), and public feedback. If we want long-standing issues fixed and critical features delivered, we need to keep making noise and providing strong signals that product investment matters.