Data API Builder and SQL MCP with Jerry Nixon

About Show #1039

How do you intelligently surface access to your database? While at NDC Toronto, Richard spoke with Jerry Nixon about Data API Builder, Microsoft's tool that enables data professionals using Microsoft databases, including SQL Server, Postgres, CosmosDB, and MySQL, to provide an API layer with security, schema extraction, and governance policies. You can expose the API as a REST interface, a GraphQL interface, and an MCP server! This is a powerful tool for providing controlled access to data while still allowing for ad-hoc access. The potential is huge - you need to check it out!

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Recorded May 7, 2026

Jerry Nixon is a Microsoft SQL Server Principal Product Manager on the Developer Experiences team, championing Data API builder. With more than two decades of experience, Jerry is an engineer at heart. He teaches Computer Science at university and speaks at events worldwide. Over the years, he has trained thousands of developers, but today, he focuses on software simplicity, intuitive tooling, and excellence in data-driven apps. You'll find him talking about quantum computing, design patterns, machine learning, and—on occasion—SQL Server, the finest of them all. He lives in Colorado, and while most of his days revolve around Outlook, Visual Studio, and online Docs, what he enjoys most is teaching his three daughters Star Trek character backstories and episode plots.

About Show #1039

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