Announcing SQL database in Fabric (Generally Available)
Co-authored by: Idris Motiwala
SQL is everywhere and Microsoft is innovating to deliver a unified experience across on-premises, cloud, and SaaS. One SQL unifies your data estate, bringing platform consistency, performance at scale, advanced security, and AI-ready tools together in one seamless experience, and SQL database in Fabric is no exception to that. At Microsoft Ignite, we’re thrilled to announce SQL database in Microsoft Fabric is officially Generally Available!
This marks a major milestone in our journey to unify operational and analytical data for the next generation of AI-powered applications. In the past year, over 50,000+ SQL databases have been created in Fabric, illustrating the incredible momentum and interest to bring operational workloads and support into Microsoft Fabric.
Why SQL Database in Fabric?
Built on the trusted SQL Server and Azure SQL Database engine, this is the first fully SaaS-native operational database experience within Microsoft Fabric. It empowers developers, data engineers, and IT professionals to build scalable, secure, and intelligent applications faster than ever.
Modern applications demand real-time insights, seamless analytics integration, and built-in AI capabilities. SQL Database in Fabric bridges the gap between transactional and analytical workloads, enabling translytical scenarios, where data is instantly available for both operational use and analytics, without performance trade-offs or complex ETL pipelines.
SQL database in Fabric is built on 3 important pillars: Simple, Autonomous & Secure, and Optimized for AI. Let’s dive into the technical features of each pillar:
1. Simple: Experience next-gen simplified database management
Setting up your SQL database in Fabric is now faster than ever.
- You can provision databases in seconds and start developing an intuitive Copilot powered editor designed for simplicity and speed.
- Developers and data professionals’ benefit from native support for T-SQL and shared queries, plus seamless integration with trusted tools like SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) and Visual Studio Code, making workflows familiar and efficient.
- OPENROWSET and External Tables for SQL databases in Fabric is now enabled, letting you query, analyze, and ingest OneLake data (CSV, Parquet, JSON) without moving or duplicating it. This feature delivers parity with Azure SQL and SQL Server, so you can develop once and deploy anywhere.
- Built-in CI/CD lets you quickly update and commit your database to GitHub or Azure DevOps, then use deployment pipelines to seamlessly move changes from development to production.
- Near real-time replication to Microsoft OneLake, paired with the SQL Analytics endpoint, that transforms your data estate into a unified platform where operational and analytical workloads work seamlessly together.
- And to keep your environment running smoothly, a comprehensive performance dashboard lets you monitor memory, CPU usage, query performance, and more.
Learn more about these new capabilities in the Data Exposed series:
“The new capabilities have reduced rework of our processes and provided faster, more reliable insights, helping us to be more responsive and impactful in our mission to improve children’s lives globally.” – Save the Children
2. Autonomous & Secure: Deliver operational excellence
SQL database in Fabric is built on an autonomous and secure foundation based on Azure SQL Database, delivering peace of mind and operational excellence. Its serverless architecture automatically scales compute and storage to meet demand, while high availability and disaster recovery are managed behind the scenes, ensuring resilience and reliability.
Security is Microsoft’s top priority. SQL Database in Fabric offers a comprehensive portfolio of capabilities across every area of security from Microsoft Entra authentication, managing workspace roles and SQL permissions, network security, data encryption, auditing and central governance with Microsoft Purview integration. To that end, we are excited to announce two new frequently asked security features now in Preview:
- SQL Auditing further strengthens transparency by supporting compliance auditing (HIPAA, SOX), threat investigation, and detailed monitoring of database activities and permission changes. To learn more, refer to the SQL Auditing documentation.
- Customer Managed Keys (CMK) at the workspace level, will now allow organizations to encrypt data encryption keys with their own Azure Key Vault keys for enhanced compliance and risk reduction. To learn more, refer to the CMK documentation.
“Using Fabric is a key part of our operations, and features such as customer managed keys play an important role in supporting our clients who have high security and regulatory standards. This capability gives them more flexibility and assurance when it comes to managing data encryption. The setup process is straightforward and does not require extensive technical effort.” – Data-Driven AI
Learn about the new security features in the Data Exposed videos.
In terms of licensing and capacities, SQL database in Fabric shares the same capacity model as other Fabric workloads. Billing is based on compute and storage usage, with auto-scaling ensuring cost efficiency. You can monitor usage with the Microsoft Fabric Capacity Metrics App and optimize with Azure Cost Analysis.
3. Optimized for AI, integrated with Fabric
SQL database in Fabric is designed for modern, AI-powered applications, offering native support for vector data and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) patterns to enable advanced semantic search and generative AI scenarios.
“When it comes to SQL in Fabric, a huge advantage is you have the robustness of SQL Server, but already in the context of Fabric. The fact that it already has so many security features and integrations with the rest of the Fabric platform is a huge advantage. SQL database in Fabric is more precise than basic search, it combines vector search with SQL filtering to find the most relevant answers to complex questions.” – Eastman
Its seamless integration with leading AI platforms including Azure OpenAI, Microsoft Foundry, LangChain, and Semantic Kernel empowers developers to build intelligent solutions with ease. Check out these repos to develop a fully functional agentic AI app and a RAG pipeline.
How Are Customers Using SQL database in Fabric?
During preview, we engaged with hundreds of customers and partners to learn how they are using SQL database in Fabric. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. What we consistently hear is SQL database in Fabric is a ‘game-changer’.
Customers rely on SQL database in Fabric as an Operational Data Store (ODS) for near real-time integrated reporting and analytics. It is also powering event-driven applications that respond instantly to streaming data and enabling line-of-business apps by combining Power Apps, SQL, and Power BI for custom solutions with embedded analytics.
Customers are also leveraging SQL database in Fabric to drive and orchestrate meta-driven pipelines where automated ingestion and transformation streamline data workflows. With built-in support for vectors and external endpoints, developers are building advanced AI applications, enabling scenarios like semantic search and retrieval-augmented generation. Reverse ETL lets teams push curated data back into SQL database in Fabric for operational use in systems such as CRMs and ERPs, while Power BI writebacks allow users to update operational data directly from reports.
“When maintaining metadata for your enterprise data, or writing back to Power BI, Fabric SQL database is a match made in heaven…taking this translytical relationship to the next level.” – AP Pension
Additionally, SQL database in Fabric serves as a trusted Reference Data Store, ensuring consistent, validated master data across apps, pipelines, and analytics.
Get started today!
With the general availability of SQL database in Fabric, Microsoft is delivering a unified, SaaS by default, PaaS configurable database for modern data workloads. Stay tuned as we advance SQL database in Fabric capabilities to further simplify app development, accelerate insights, and enable organizations to manage and activate data at scale.
Ready to get started? Check out the SQL database in Fabric playlist on YouTube to see more videos, including videos about overall updates, as well as updates for AI App Dev, Copilot, Data virtualization, Notebooks, Backup/restore, performance dashboard and more.
If you are attending Microsoft Ignite, check out our breakout session.
You can further skill up by referencing our SQL database documentation, tutorials, full end-to-end agentic app sample, and RAG samples. You can join the conversation with us on the Fabric forums or review our roadmap and also join us in person at SQLCon Atlanta in 2026.
