Thanks to Kevin Chant for inviting us to write this month’s T-SQL Tuesday. This month is special, as Kevin mentioned due to the Festive Tech Calendar, which I have been speaking about for a couple of years now. Every day of the December month, a new recording or a blog post will be released for you to view. If you are not following their youtube channel yet, you must subscribe to get the wealth of information on the latest and the greatest features in Microsoft space.
As Kevin invited us to write about our most exciting feature, I would love to write about the SQL Database in Fabric.
Note: This is a new feature that was announced in the Microsoft Ignite 2024 in November.
As per Microsoft docs,
“SQL database in Microsoft Fabric is a developer-friendly transactional database, based on Azure SQL Database, that allows you to easily create your operational database in Fabric. A SQL database in Fabric uses the same SQL Database Engine as Azure SQL Database.”
As you read, this is a transactional database that can be created in fabric and can be replicated to Data Lake for the analytical workloads. The other main goal is to help build AI apps faster using the SQL Databases in Fabric. The data is replicated in near real time and converted to Parquet, in an analytics-ready format. This database can be shared with different users without giving them the access to the workspaces but giving the access to the database will automatically give them the access to the SQL analytics endpoint and associated default semantic model. You can use the SQL database in Fabric for the data engineering and data science purposes. The other cool thing is, you can use the built-in git repository to manage your SQL database.
As you know Microsoft Fabric is a software as a service (SaaS) platform that combines data engineering, data science, and data warehousing into a unified analytics solution for enterprises. All of these services within the fabric can access the SQL Database in Fabric through the Data Lake for analytical purposes.
This feature is in Public preview now. You can test the SQL Database in Fabric for free for 60 Days. You need to have a fabric capacity.
Make sure to Enable SQL database in Fabric using Admin Portal tenant settings. For more details, you can follow this Microsoft doc.
You can query the database in fabric using the query editor, SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), sqlcmd, bcp utility and GitHub Copilot.
As this is a new feature, there are resources available on Microsoft Reactor youtube channel. There are series of videos being released by this channel since couple of days ago. Please look below for the list of the videos and dates they are released:
You can find the first video here
For more information, do not forget to read these blogs from Anna Hoffman and Slindsay
Resources:
Thank you for reading!
Deepthi Goguri's SQL Server Blog 