Buhler India Private Limited enhances security, performance, and productivity with SQL Server 2025

Buhler (India) Pvt. Ltd. (Bühler) operates at the center of India’s rapidly evolving manufacturing sector. As a leader in food processing equipment, the company is driven to deliver uncompromising quality and reliability by helping to ensure that its manufacturing operations remain secure, efficient, and future ready. “Whether it’s in technology, manufacturing, or solving customer and user problems, we have a thirst for adopting new technologies,” says Shailesh Panday, Deputy Manager, Infrastructure and Cloud, at Buhler (India) Pvt. Ltd.

To deliver on those goals, Bühler launched a proof of concept (POC) using the Microsoft SQL Server 2025 Early Adoption Program. This test case has shown great promise for future improvement in security, increased performance, and accelerated developer productivity. For Bühler, this sort of progress isn’t optional—it’s part of the company’s DNA.

Strengthening hybrid cloud security with Azure Arc

With the ever-present threat of bad actors, Bühler’s commitment to hybrid cloud security is nonnegotiable. Because the company already used Microsoft Azure solution Azure Arc for its SQL servers, it could incorporate secure authentication with Microsoft Entra passwordless authentication to reinforce its hybrid cloud security.

“One of the first things we wanted was to move to passwordless authentication because it tightens our hybrid cloud security, and SQL Server 2025 makes it an easy integration,” says Shailesh.

When SQL Server 2025 is fully implemented, managed identity with Entra ID will improve and facilitate the company’s security posture by reducing credential exposure and tightening compliance controls. Users will no longer be required to store passwords on local systems or on paper. Passwordless authentication will also mean fewer locked accounts and, therefore, fewer support calls to unlock them, a benefit to both security and efficiency.

Optimizing performance for mission-critical workloads by 5%–7%

However, as its production demands grew, Bühler’s IT infrastructure began showing strain. The company housed multiple databases on some servers, which created performance bottlenecks. If two or three databases used all the available “tempdb” resources, other databases on the same server could not operate freely. The advanced “tempdb” resource governance helped to ensure smoother production availability and fewer contention issues.

Using optimized locking and intelligent query processing enhancements, Bühler’s POC has seen a 5%–7% performance gain in core database workloads. “Once this solution is fully implemented and tested with an application connected to it, the performance improvement is expected to be much higher,” says Shailesh. 

Accelerating developer productivity by 10%–15%

Bühler began testing its ability to accelerate developer productivity. The company discovered that the GitHub Copilot for MSSQL extension for Visual Studio Code simplifies audit logging and removes reliance on legacy export methods. It also uses the solutions to streamline query writing and explore schema directly within the developer workflow.

“The MSSQL extension for Visual Studio Code makes writing queries much faster because it can easily read your schema and tables, then help you write up a better code. Something that would usually take developers an hour or two can be done in 5–10 minutes,” says Shailesh.

When fully implemented, Bühler expects that the upgrade will boost developer productivity by 10%–15%. 

Leading the future of manufacturing

Looking ahead, Bühler is exploring additional SQL Server 2025 innovations to future-proof its manufacturing IT. To reduce turnaround times for new features, the company will focus on developer efficiency with Microsoft Copilot–assisted Transact-SQL coding using GitHub Copilot in SQL Server Management Studio 22. With eyes on AI and Microsoft Fabric, Bühler is ensuring its future scalability across on-premises and hybrid environments.

By exploring the features of SQL Server 2025 in its POC, Bühler is already seeing gains in security, performance, and developer productivity. The company’s collaboration with Microsoft has laid the groundwork for future breakthroughs. “Our testing of SQL Server 2025 has delivered quality and performance: two things that are a top priority for Bühler,” says Shailesh.

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