Dell Technologies World 2025 | Rob Sonders, Dell & Bob Ward, Microsoft

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Rob Sonders

Technical Staff Engineering Technologist

Dell Technologies

Bob Ward

Principal Architect

Microsoft

play_circle_outline SQL Server 2025 Preview Revealed: Developers Empowered with New AI Integration Tools

play_circle_outline Maximizing Benefits: Dell Customers Gain Edge with Microsoft Partnership for SQL Server 2025 Solutions

play_circle_outline Operational nuances and benefits for DBAs in SQL Server 2025

play_circle_outline Collaboration between software and hardware companies for customer success.

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Rob Sonders, Dell & Bob Ward, Microsoft

Rob Sonders

Technical Staff Engineering Technologist Dell Technologies

Bob Ward

Principal Architect Microsoft

Rob Sonders, technical staff engineering technologist at Dell Technologies Inc., and Bob Ward, principal architect at Microsoft Corp., join theCUBE’s Savannah Peterson and Dave Vellante at Dell Technologies World 2025 to spotlight innovations in SQL Server 2025. The conversation explores how AI-infused capabilities are redefining data performance, security, and enterprise value.

Ward shares details on more than 40 new engine features designed to boost reliability, availability and AI-readiness. Sonders and Ward discuss how Dell and Microsoft’s collab... Read more

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What recent announcements were made regarding SQL Server 2025? add

What is the nature of the partnership between Microsoft and Dell, particularly in relation to SQL Server and on-premises solutions? add

What improvements and features does the new SQL Server engine offer for security, performance, and availability? add

What is the role of Dell in providing solutions for AI deployment? add

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Rob Sonders, Dell & Bob Ward, Microsoft

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Savannah Peterson

>> Good evening, Dell Community, and welcome to fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. We're here kicking off our coverage of Dell Tech World. My name's Savannah Peterson, joined for all the fun with Dave Vellante. Dave, I'm so thrilled to be back at the show with you this year.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah. It's a good show. This was the first show, it was EMC World back in 2010. Of course, now Dell of course owns EMC, so this got it all started.

Savannah Peterson

>> I know it did. You just had Michael on, and now we have two other fantastic guests. Please welcome Bob and Rob to the show. Thank you so much for being here, guys.

Bob Ward

>> Yeah. Great to be here.

Rob Sonders

>> Thanks.

Savannah Peterson

>> We get you back on for the first time since 2019.

Bob Ward

>> I was here in 2019. That's right.

Savannah Peterson

>> You are CUBE OG. I love that.

Bob Ward

>> Talking SQL '19 back then. That's right.

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, and how appropriate that you are here to talk to us about the very big announcement of SQL 2025. Tell us all about everything that just got dropped this week.

Bob Ward

>> No problem, Savannah. So today, Satya Nadella, our CEO announced the public preview of SQL Server 2025. I've been here now 32 years at Microsoft. So for me it's just a personal blessing that all of a sudden now we have a new version SQL Server. I've seen it all from diskettes now to AI, which is what we're focusing on. We have a cool new logo,-

Dave Vellante

>> I love the logo.

Savannah Peterson

>> ....

Bob Ward

>> that we introduced today for SQL '25. And one of the things that Satya talked about is AI obviously, right? Big . Say AI being built in as a major part of this release. There's no question. We'd love to somehow dive and talk more about, especially because Michael talked a lot about data and AI today in the keynote.

Savannah Peterson

>> Absolutely.

Bob Ward

>> But this is the largest release for SQL Server developers in a decade. So much poured in for devs. I'm going to leave here, unfortunately I'd love to be here all week, but I'm going to go to Microsoft Build tomorrow and start talking to developers also about this event, this release. But for SQL Server, the core engine, security, performance availability, we have to have that or we don't have a release. And we've done some 40 new features of engine type things in this release as well. So a lot packed in. We're pretty excited about it.

Savannah Peterson

>> It sounds like there's a lot going on. What does that mean for all the fabulous Dell customers who get to take advantage of that?

Rob Sonders

>> Well, Microsoft and Dell a long time and there's a lot of SQL Server.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, you guys are OG partners.

Bob Ward

>> We are.

Rob Sonders

>> We are.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah. The best way.

Rob Sonders

>> There's a lot of SQL Server running on-premises on Dell kit, with Dell compute, with Dell storage. We have a lot of different solutions we've written together. And the beauty of it is we can extend with the API driven SQL Server 2025 and the AI solutions. This only makes it more robust for on-premises customers, because there's so much SQL Server running on our kit.

Bob Ward

>> Dell is one of the largest installation basis of course in the world.

Savannah Peterson

>> Wow.

Bob Ward

>> Absolutely. On-premises, right? So for us-

Savannah Peterson

>> I mean it makes sense.

Bob Ward

>> It makes sense. And we've been that partnership from the very beginning to now. So it's very exciting to be at this event and just continue to talk about that evolution of our partner.

Dave Vellante

>> So what are the salient aspects of '25 that we should know about SQL Server '25?

Bob Ward

>> AI being built into such a big thing. Michael talked about data and AI today. For Microsoft, we say data fuels AI. You don't have to have that data, right? And SQL Server being this base of data for Dell customers for years. So now all of a sudden customers can now build AI applications, but securely do it in the SQL engine itself, but communicate with AI models wherever they live, ground or cloud. So if customers are thinking about, for example, Dell AI factory, SQL Server '25 just plugs into that, because we can communicate with any AI model wherever it lives. And I saw that today, I was just looking at the keynote from Michael talking about factory, and in my mind I'm like, yeah, we fit right into that play. And if you're a Dell customer and you own Dell hardware, you're thinking it's Dell AI factory solution for me, we fit right into a perfect .

Savannah Peterson

>> It makes perfect sense. I mean it's such a core part of the ecosystem. Everyone has used SQL or has SQL or is familiar at least with the technology. So if I am using an older version of SQL, what's going to be the most dramatic difference that I'm going to notice when I am exploring now or if I'm a Dell customer opening this up on my AI PC and getting to play around?

Bob Ward

>> Well, it's going to be the ability to use the T-SQL language, which everybody in the world loves. They love the SQL language. Everything we do is allowed in SQL. So you're running a legacy version of SQL Server, you're finding should I upgrade to SQL '25? Well, yeah, I need to put AI with my data now, but I have all this great T-SQL language that I've known for years that I can just use. And here's the beautiful part. I can use the security model, the scalability of the query processor to take advantage of it. So all that stuff I'm familiar with just works when you make that upgrade.

Dave Vellante

>> We used to joke that SQL is the killer app in big data, right? And so are there any particular industries that you guys see that are going to take this up? Is it financial services, it is healthcare, I mean it's ubiquitous across the board, but maybe some early signs of who's going to benefit the most and how you see that playing out?

Rob Sonders

>> Well, SQL Server's everywhere. It just is, like you mentioned. The funny fact on that, we were sitting back here last year when Michael said, I like this-

Bob Ward

>> .

Rob Sonders

>> Michael said, bring the AI to the data. And Bob said, "Rob, this is what we need to do with SQL Server." Now we're here with AI with SQL Server. It's a pretty cool story. But the industries, again, you're everywhere, we're everywhere. Enterprise, small, medium business. There's a lot of small medium business that just needs some AI help, right? There's all this data locked up inside of SQL Server.

Bob Ward

>> The cool story is just vector searching. combined with the Dell hardware stack that they would love.

Rob Sonders

>> So we can use our GPU enabled power edges. We can use Windows Server 2025 GPU partitioning SQL Server there. We also have our Dell AX nodes for Azure Local, the premier solution right there. Don't forget SQL Server runs there. SQL Server runs in a container with Azure Kubernetes service, Linux.

Bob Ward

>> Yeah, we still run on Linux containers, Kubernetes, Windows Server, all the flavors you want. Doesn't matter which platform. This AI technology works with all of that.

Dave Vellante

>> So vector search is now embedded in SQL Server '25.

Bob Ward

>> Exactly.

Dave Vellante

>> It's a first party citizen.

Bob Ward

>> First party citizen.

Dave Vellante

>> And that's new, is that correct?

Bob Ward

>> Brand new. Yes, sir.

Dave Vellante

>> Okay. So prior to that I would've had a bolt on maybe an open source, a Milvus or a Pinecone, but now it's embedded. So what does that mean for customers? Is it speed? Is it simplicity? What does that mean for the user?

Bob Ward

>> It is absolutely speed for sure, because we have one of the most best query processors in the world. We also have a new vector index on top of this data using disk and technology. A popular vector and disk technology from Microsoft, and then security's paramount. People want to be very secure with their data. So why not co-locate all these vectors with the data you already have secure with all the security model you know and trust with SQL Server? And the beautiful about the AI part, the AI models are not loaded in the engine. They're isolated from the engine. So you don't affect your actual workloads by running the AI models.

Savannah Peterson

>> Oh, that's interesting. And so if anything goes haywire, you're not damaging your data-

Bob Ward

>> That's exactly ....

Savannah Peterson

>> as well, which mitigates risk, which I'm sure a lot of folks adopting new technology.

Bob Ward

>> That's what I'm concerned about. Absolutely. Yeah. And we support popular models, you name it, NVIDIA NIM, anything with OpenAI, Ollama, all the different popular frameworks and models that are supported for vectors, we support any of it. You pick the model, you choose it, and we can work with SQL Server to make your data better.

Dave Vellante

>> Are there any operational nuances or benefits that people are going to get, customers are going to get, whether it's performance tuning or space management, are there any sort of things like that that are included? What's it mean to the life of a database administrator?

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah.

Bob Ward

>> Yeah. Besides just AI, people are like, you have this best engine here, what are you doing with this? I kind of hit it earlier. 40 plus features across the engine for security, performance and availability. Here's a good example, always on availability group replicas. That's the core of availability for people, for SQL Server customers. We have a dozen improvements of that technology. More reliable, better tuning, better diagnostics. So we're not forgetting those core DBAs that need that tried and true features of engine. You make an upgrade to SQL '25, you just get better in terms of reliability and availability.

Savannah Peterson

>> So when you're developing this wonderful new announcement that you just had this week, what is your interface like with Dell and your customers from a usage perspective? I'm curious what the feedback looks like.

Bob Ward

>> Yeah. Yeah, Rob.

Rob Sonders

>> So if we stay tuned to some announcements that are coming tomorrow from Dell-

Bob Ward

>> Oh, you're sneak peeking something, Rob.

Rob Sonders

>> Yeah. I mean what if we could take compute, storage and maybe put all this together in some sort of way to get to this ecosystem, including SQL Server and Windows Server, or maybe you want to do anything in Linux container. What if we could do all of that in a way that could say make that happen?

Savannah Peterson

>> That sounds like a great idea.

Rob Sonders

>> So coming tomorrow, there's announcements on this.

Bob Ward

>> The bottom line is that, my customers use SQL want a platform they can trust. So they look at Dell. And Dell customers want to trust the database platforms that look to us. So if you look at example of just the partnership we do, we meet on a regular basis. Our engineering teams talk to each other, our marketing teams talk to each other. It's like a step-by-step partnership.

Rob Sonders

>> You and I talk to each other.

Bob Ward

>> We talk to all the time. Rob's got on my cell phone number all the time about SQL Server. Now the partnership's amazing. Like I said, the biggest install base for SQL in the world, it shows all the time because our solutions look integrated together. So yeah, I can't wait to see this journey's going to go further. I'm really excited about things like Dell AI factory, and seeing my SQL Server customers get that opportunity to use it.

Dave Vellante

>> That's right. That's right. It was interesting. I think it was in the last earnings call, I mean Microsoft blew away it's Azure numbers. I think it was 30, I don't know, 35% constant currency growth, which was amazing. And I think I heard that a lot of that growth came from non-AI workloads. And so you guys were talking earlier about on-prem. Are you seeing, I mean, bring AI to the data. We're obviously big fans of that nomenclature. Are you seeing a renewed modernization going on with the on-prem piece and what's driving that?

Bob Ward

>> Yeah. I don't know about you, Rob, but I see that absolutely. And this is why today the excitement of our announcement about this next major release, it kind of proved to our customers, we still care about that, right? Some customer asked me last year, "Do you even care about on-prem?" I'm like, "Well, get ready." So I think I was announcing even a new major version with all this innovation just proves to our customers, yeah, we do like people running in the cloud at Microsoft. We've talk about that all the time, but on-prem is still a major major part of our business and our customer.

Rob Sonders

>> And on that topic, we need more storage on-prem. So then we bolt in PowerFlex to Azure Local to extend the storage. Of course all our enterprise-grade storage that we already bring to the table. And again, not to talk about it again, but if we could do this all in a way that's really easy, that's going to be really awesome.

Bob Ward

>> But even look today we announced at we announced Azure local AI Foundry. So we're bringing even AI Foundry that we've proven in now on-premises to run AI workloads on-prem.

Dave Vellante

>> For like a sovereign situation or latency or whatever-

Bob Ward

>> For whatever reason, somebody wants to stay on-prem we're going to still .

Dave Vellante

>> Or I'm not moving my claim system into the cloud.

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, what I'm hearing here that's really great is we're not just bringing AI to where the data is, you're also meeting your customers wherever they are, wherever that might be, whether that's in the cloud or on-prem. Are you seeing any interesting trends in that space as the AI adoption starts happening? Are folks wanting to keep things there? Are they trusting the cloud? I mean SQL houses a lot of-

Bob Ward

>> ....

Savannah Peterson

>> sensitive data.

Bob Ward

>> I mean, one of the things about our solution's really beautiful is that SQL runs an Azure SQL in the cloud. It now runs a Microsoft Fabric unified platform and SQL Server. So I've got customers running in both spaces, but they want consistency. So our AI solution works across all of those the same. So developers just build an app once and deploy it wherever they want to. And that's what they want from us. We were in a session today asking our customers, the Dell customers, are you Azure only, cloud-only or private-only or hybrid? Everybody said hybrid. So we need to meet them where they are. And that's both of those.

Rob Sonders

>> And just the grassroots of everybody using SQL Server. It's a platform. I remember talking to you a few years ago where, and now there's big resurgence of SQL Server, because there's still so much data locked up there that needs to be AI-ified maybe. There we go.

Bob Ward

>> Our customers expect us to meet the pace of innovation.

Rob Sonders

>> Right.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah. Or even just understood, I mean I love that we're having this conversation. I'm thinking back to 2000 and oh boy, 2012 I was working for a 3D printing startup at the time. And when I wanted some insights from our BI guy, from our SQL Server, I would have to put in my request two weeks, three weeks literally before I would have the insights necessary to go make a market-driving decision powered by venture capital. So obviously speed being the name of the game right now and the velocity of innovation has never been faster. What sort of capacities, what are the magical moments that you've been getting to see as people have been testing this out and having that light-bulb moment of just how much faster it is? Can you give me some examples of that?

Bob Ward

>> Yeah. Absolutely. So one of the things that developers see all the time is just concurrency of their data, their applications. They're always running into stairs with blocking each other.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's a great point. Yeah.

Bob Ward

>> And so we've put a lot of innovation in this release to do that. We've freed up developers now that didn't even worry about concurrency of their apps running against each other in the database. And the great story is we tested this in the cloud, so we proved it and tested it in the cloud first, and then brought it down to SQL Server. So developers have more excitement or more confidence it's running well.

Dave Vellante

>> You're almost a hundred billion company. You're a multi-hundred billion-dollar company. So of course there's going to be some overlap. There's some overlap in PCs and obviously Azure's infrastructure. But generally speaking, you guys, you're much more partners than you are competitors. What does a software company look for in a hardware company and what does a hardware company look for in a software company?

Bob Ward

>> You go first, Rob, what do you look for in us?

Rob Sonders

>> Somebody that innovates and meeting our customers where they're at. Because right now our customers still need a little help, especially those core DBAs, those core SQL Server people.

Savannah Peterson

>> I think a lot of people still need a little bit of help, it so lovingly, but I think those who are trying to pretend like they're really out in front right now, I mean we're iterating, we're exploring, we're learning together. No one's really got their entire ten-year AI program and their DBs architecture sorted.

Rob Sonders

>> I love that. It's now with SQL Server whereas again, back to the beginning, SQL's everywhere. Now these DBAs can do the AI things they've been trying to get to.

Bob Ward

>> For me, AI, the solution is the proof point of this. We build the building blocks to use AI, but we don't tell you what AI to use. We're going to go look to Dell to steer their customers, what's the right hardware? What's the right capacity? What AI model should you use? SQL has all the plumbing and connection to use it.

Rob Sonders

>> We bring in AI back to-

Bob Ward

>> Use Dell to make that recommendation what to do. And that's a great proof point. We want our customers just to turn to them and say, hey, deploy models this way, SQL just connects with it.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah. That's pretty sweet. The first thing I did with my Dell AI PC, this is going to be real relevant for you guys. I unboxed it, thank you, Dell, and I brought up Microsoft Copilot and I had to design my nails for the show based on the Dell colors and-

Bob Ward

>> Copilot could do anything right?...

Savannah Peterson

>> . No, but I mean it is all very tangible. All right gentlemen, I've got one very important question for you because you're a now many-time CUBE alum, and we're definitely going to have you back on. So when we're hanging at Dell Tech World 2026, what do you hope to be able to say then that you can't yet say today?

Rob Sonders

>> Boy.

Dave Vellante

>> Well, Rob wants to talk about the analysis .

Savannah Peterson

>> It is, and let me tell you, I go back .

Rob Sonders

>> I can tell you right now. I look forward to 2026, I'm already scribing what we're going to do for demos and talks, it's going to be a lot of fun next year when we have a few more pieces, stars aligning products.

Bob Ward

>> Yeah. I mean, for me, I want the industry proof points. I want to come back and say, hey, I helped this insurance company build this solution with Dell, with AI. I helped this healthcare company. I want the industry big proof points to happen with public preview. I mean, before public preview, it's been hard to kind of get those things. So as we move towards general availability and even in next year, that's what I'd like to show as the industry examples.

Savannah Peterson

>> Oh yeah, absolutely.

Dave Vellante

>> Looking forward to that. Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> Wait, Rob, I'm not going to let you off the hook. That was you just beginning to talk there. So what is it that you want to be able to say? I know you were talking about you're already thinking about things for next year. Where are we going? Give me your prediction.

Rob Sonders

>> Being able to, again, use SQL Server from a Microsoft perspective to get that in. I mean, we have SQL Server running here on our NativeEdge offerings as a whatever outcome you're trying to get to. Being able to put the AI with the data wherever it sits, anywhere in the customer's data center at their Edge with AI factory, anywhere, small, medium business doesn't matter.

Bob Ward

>> With speed and performance, storage, everything going with it, right?

Rob Sonders

>> With tooling, as you mentioned. The biggest thing about that with the tooling that customers already know , because you don't have to retrain. There's other things we need to retrain on. There's a lot of things that you retrain on. That's where a lot of automation comes into play too, but still using those core tools, that makes it awesome.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's a really great point, Rob. Rob and Bob, thank you so much for coming to hang out. This was absolutely fantastic-

Bob Ward

>> Thanks for having us.

Rob Sonders

>> Yeah....

Savannah Peterson

>> taking off the show well for us. And thank you Dave, always a joy.

Dave Vellante

>>

Savannah Peterson

>> Thank all of you for tuning in wherever you might be. We're here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada, day one of Dell Tech World. My name is Savannah Petersen. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.