What’s new for SQL database in Fabric?
Spring 2025 round up: performance, Developer Experience, and Data Management!
Co-author: Idris Motiwala
This week, at the 2025 Fabric Conference in Las Vegas, we are unveiling a series of features for the SQL database in Fabric, including: performance enhancements, streamlined developer workflows, and improved data pipeline management. Here are the high-level features you can look forward to!
Backup billing
SQL database in Microsoft Fabric offers automatic backups from the moment of database creation, ensuring data protection and recovery. The system makes full back up every week, differential backups every 12 hours and transaction log backups every 10 minutes, providing point-in-time restore capability up to 7 days. While compute and data storage are already included in the Fabric capacity billing model, starting April 1, 2025, backup storage will also be billed. Customers will only be billed for backup storage that exceeds the allocated database size.
Learn more about backups, or backup billing.
Performance Dashboard: lead blocking query
Performance Dashboard is designed to give users deeper insights into their database’s performance. Of the available metrics for exploration in this dashboard is the ability to check blocking queries. Previously, all blocking queries were listed together – but now the dashboard intuitively identifies the lead blocking query to allow developers to quickly identify which SQL queries are the root cause of blocking – thereby creating an intuitive pathway for users to streamline and improve their operational workloads.
Developer: Terraform CRUD Support
At FabCon we are announcing the availability Terraform CRUD Support for Fabric, including support for SQL database in Fabric. This feature integrates the powerful Terraform tool, enabling developers to manage their SQL database infrastructure as code. This capability enables customers to automate, scale, integrate, and govern their SQL databases within Microsoft Fabric, using a declarative approach with Terraform. The Fabric platform supports HashiCorp Terraform: an open-source tool that offers a secure, predictable, and consistent method for deploying and managing infrastructure across multiple cloud environments.
Learn more about fabric-terraform-quickstart and find out more information in the Terraform support for Fabric GA announcement.
Data pipeline enhancements
New data pipeline enhancements will provide significant improvements to the way data is processed and managed within SQL databases in Fabric. We are adding stronger integration of SQL database with other fabric workloads to reduce complexity. For example, we will now support creating a new source SQL database from the data flow workload and selecting the SQL database destination.
In addition, SQL database in Fabric can be seamlessly called from Power BI Desktop to build reports easily.
Finally, Fabric data pipelines will now support Fabric SQL database as a data source for Stored Procedure and Script activities, allowing users to just pick a database rather than having to enter connection information.
There is a lot happening with SQL database in Fabric! We hope that you plan to join us at the 2025 Fabric Conference this week! If we see you there – please stop by to ask questions, share your thoughts, or to see demos of these exciting features!
Submit your feedback on Fabric Ideas and join the conversation on the Fabric Community. To get into the technical details, head over to the Fabric documentation.
