Enhancements
• Active Directory Service Principal support for Bulk Copy (#576)
What changed: bulkcopy now supports Authentication=ActiveDirectoryServicePrincipal. Because the tenant ID is only discoverable from the STS URL the server returns mid-handshake, the driver registers a token-provider callback (invoked with spn, sts_url, auth_method) that parses the tenant, builds a ClientSecretCredential, and returns a UTF-16LE encoded JWT.
Who benefits: Users who authenticate with a service principal (client ID + client secret) and need to perform bulk inserts against Azure SQL / SQL Server.
Impact: Service principal credentials now work for bulk copy operations, resolving the previous "Authentication method 'ActiveDirectoryServicePrincipal' is not supported. No token provider was registered for this method." error.
Bug Fixes
• Non-ASCII VARCHAR data in the Arrow fetch path (#575)
What changed: The Arrow fetch path now requests SQL_CHAR data as SQL_C_WCHAR (UTF-16LE) instead of relying on the narrow character path. This guarantees correct decoding regardless of encoding settings, locale, or operating system, with no significant performance impact.
Who benefits: Users fetching VARCHAR/CHAR columns containing non-ASCII data through the Arrow interface.
Impact: Arrow fetch methods now always return correct string data independent of the host environment.
PR #575 | GitHub Issue #553 - Thanks @ffelixg for the contribution!
• Bulk load connection timeouts (#641)
What changed: Fixed connection timeouts that occurred during bulk load operations. The fix lands in the Rust core and is picked up by bumping the bundled mssql_py_core dependency from 0.1.4 to 0.1.5. (via mssql_py_core)
Who benefits: Users running bulk load operations that previously hit intermittent connection timeouts.
Impact: Bulk load operations complete reliably without spurious connection timeouts.