What's New: Server and Database (2025 release wave 1)

Overview

The video covers platform changes in four parts: AL runtime enhancements, database stack improvements, web services stack hardening, and reporting stack and developer features. Runtime items include net formats for numbers in auto format expressions, new get URL overloads with a layout parameter, calculating only visible flow fields, and a session information stack property for capturing stack traces.

Database and security items include a copy company operation up to five times faster, extra fields on the database missing indexes page, and an on-premises SQL multi-subnet failover setting. Hardening covers HTTP server certificate validation and blocking Microsoft-owned UI pages as SOAP endpoints. Reporting items include PDF post-processing, report metadata in Word layouts, layout obsolescence, report layouts page changes and a validate action.

Key points

• Net formats let auto format expressions format numbers differently for positive, negative or zero values. They do not work in the format function.
• Calculating only visible flow fields needs a feature management key for now. It is planned to become the default later.
• Copy company is up to five times faster, but it can take significant locks and needs substantial database resources. Do not run it during working hours.
• The database missing indexes page now shows seeks, scans, average total cost, average impact and estimated benefit.
• Outgoing HTTP client calls now validate server certificates and do not call endpoints with invalid ones. In version 26 this can be disabled via a feature management key. In October 2025 it will be enforced with no way to disable it.
• Microsoft-owned UI pages are blocked from being published as SOAP endpoints. This can be disabled via feature management for now, and per-tenant extensions can still expose pages. Enforcement comes in a later release wave.
• New telemetry events help troubleshooting: RT52 logs outgoing calls that fail certificate validation, and RT53 logs calls to SOAP endpoints on Microsoft UI pages.

Features

AL objects mentioned

As heard in the captions. A name that matches one object page by exact type and name links to it; the others stay as named.

• other “record ref” at 2:26
• other “session information” at 2:43

Quotes

• 0:22 “The first enhancement we did in the AL runtime is a new way you can format numbers with net formats.”
• 3:49 “This operation is now up to five times faster especially if you have a lot of data.”
• 6:33 “we now validate whether that certificate is valid. If not, we will actually not call the endpoint.”
• 7:01 “in October 2025 this validation will be enforced and uh you can no longer disable this hardening in feature management.”
• 7:21 “in case you need to know whether any um outgoing calls are failing due to this hardening there’s a new telemetry event RT52”
• 8:11 “we will block UI pages published by Microsoft as SOAP endpoints.”
• 9:33 “In case you need to know whether any of these pages are actually being called, there is a new telemetry event”
• 10:01 “we added the ability to do PDF post-processing in the context of running a report.”
• 11:28 “if you open the XML here in the developer experience in Word, you now have this BC report information.”

Disclaimers in the video

• 2:09 preview: for now you need to enable this with a feature management key calculate only visible flow fields and then later we will make this the default value.
• 6:47 subject-to-change: In version 26, you can disable this hardening behavior. So, so that in case you have endpoints that needs to be fixed, uh you can you can disable a feature management.
• 7:01 coming-later: in the next version in October 2025 this validation will be enforced and uh you can no longer disable this hardening in feature management.
• 8:28 subject-to-change: note that in a later release wave this blocking will be enforced.
• 14:41 coming-later: we are also introducing font validation in version 26. it will just be for RDL layouts. In a later minor update, uh we will also add this for Word and Excel.