Let's start the REST API fun with the Data API Builder that Microsoft released as an open-source-engine in 2024, after 3 years of development. It provides us with an easy method to create and publish REST API endpoints for CRUD operations on databases. Your can choose to accomplish this via a GUI in VS-Code or using a simple configuration file, and GraphQL as well as MCP endpoints are also supported.

A new feature in SQL Server 2025 is the function to consume external REST APIs from your T-SQL code, even in on-premises environments. Many of those APIs respond using the well-known JSON data format. In part 2 of this session you'll learn how to set things up, how to query those APIs in different scenarios and how to handle their responses.

I'll also introduce the Postman and the Beeceptor tools that help us along the way of testing our API calls, and we'll have many mostly free-to-use API examples from different categories to get you started immediately.