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Mirroring Azure SQL Managed Instance (Preview)

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Mirroring in Fabric provides an easy experience to avoid complex ETL (Extract Transform Load) and integrate your existing Azure SQL Managed Instance estate with the rest of your data in Microsoft Fabric. You can continuously replicate your existing SQL Managed Instance databases directly into Fabric's OneLake. Inside Fabric, you can unlock powerful business intelligence, artificial intelligence, Data Engineering, Data Science, and data sharing scenarios.

For a tutorial on configuring your Azure SQL Managed Instance for Mirroring in Fabric, see Tutorial: Configure Microsoft Fabric mirrored databases from Azure SQL Managed Instance (Preview).

Why use Mirroring in Fabric?

With Mirroring in Fabric, you don't need to piece together different services from multiple vendors. Instead, you can enjoy a highly integrated, end-to-end, and easy-to-use product that is designed to simplify your analytics needs, and built for openness and collaboration between Microsoft, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and the 1000s of technology solutions that can read the open-source Delta Lake table format.

What analytics experiences are built in?

Mirrored databases are an item in the Fabric Data Warehouse distinct from the Warehouse and SQL analytics endpoint.

Diagram of Fabric database mirroring for Azure SQL Managed Instance.

Mirroring creates three items in your Fabric workspace:

  • The mirrored database item. Mirroring manages the replication of data into OneLake and conversion to Parquet, in an analytics-ready format. This enables downstream scenarios like data engineering, data science, and more.
  • A SQL analytics endpoint
  • A default semantic model

Each mirrored Azure SQL Managed Instance has an autogenerated SQL analytics endpoint that provides a rich analytical experience on top of the Delta Tables created by the mirroring process. Users have access to familiar T-SQL commands that can define and query data objects but not manipulate the data from the SQL analytics endpoint, as it's a read-only copy. You can perform the following actions in the SQL analytics endpoint:

  • Explore the tables that reference data in your Delta Lake tables from Azure SQL Managed Instance.
  • Create no code queries and views and explore data visually without writing a line of code.
  • Develop SQL views, inline TVFs (Table-valued Functions), and stored procedures to encapsulate your semantics and business logic in T-SQL.
  • Manage permissions on the objects.
  • Query data in other Warehouses and Lakehouses in the same workspace.

In addition to the SQL query editor, there's a broad ecosystem of tooling that can query the SQL analytics endpoint, including SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), Azure Data Studio, and even GitHub Copilot.

Network requirements

During the current preview, Fabric Mirroring for Azure SQL Managed Instance requires you to use the Public Endpoint and to configure your SQL managed instance VNET to allow traffic from and to Azure services. You can use Azure Cloud or Power BI service tags to scope this configuration:

Active transactions, workloads, and replicator engine behaviors

  • Active transactions continue to hold the transaction log truncation until the transaction commits and the mirrored Azure SQL Managed Instance catches up, or the transaction aborts. Long-running transactions might result in the transaction log filling up more than usual. The source database transaction log should be monitored so that the transaction log doesn't fill. For more information, see Transaction log grows due to long-running transactions and CDC.
  • Each user workload varies. During initial snapshot, there might be more resource usage on the source database, for both CPU and IOPS (input/output operations per second, to read the pages). Table updates/delete operations can lead to increased log generation. Learn more on how to monitor resources for your Azure SQL Managed Instance.

Tier and purchasing model support

The source Azure SQL Managed Instance can be either a single SQL managed instance or a SQL managed instance belonging to an instance pool.

Pricing

Fabric compute used to replicate your data into Fabric OneLake is free. Storage in OneLake is free of cost based the capacity size. For more information, see Cost of mirroring and OneLake pricing for mirroring. The compute usage for querying data via SQL, Power BI, or Spark is still charged based on the Fabric Capacity.

Next step

Tutorial: Configure Microsoft Fabric mirrored databases from Azure SQL Managed Instance (Preview)

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