Mirroring in Fabric – What’s new
Mirroring is a powerful feature in Microsoft Fabric, enabling you to seamlessly reflect your existing data estate continuously from any database or data warehouse into OneLake in Fabric. Once Mirroring starts the replication process, the mirrored data is automatically kept up to date at near real-time in Fabric OneLake. With your data estates landed into OneLake, the data is now available everywhere in Fabric and ready to accelerate your data potential.
The Mirroring team has been hard at work to deliver amazing capabilities and are listening to your valuable feedback and ideas. Our team is committed to helping you easily run Mirroring in Fabric as part of your production workload. Some of these capabilities include, Mirroring supporting databases behind a firewall, adding Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server as a new Database Mirroring offering, to must-haves for enterprise readiness such as Mirroring supporting CI/CD and integration into Workspace Monitoring.
Let’s dive into the amazing new capabilities with Mirroring in Microsoft Fabric.
Database Mirroring now supports sources behind a Firewall
Database Mirroring is an amazing feature in Microsoft Fabric with seamless data replication and high availability for your critical workloads. However, connecting to databases with your most critical data, behind a firewall or on-premises, requires the right integration and approach.
Database Mirroring now supports connectivity to Azure SQL Database, Snowflake, and soon with Azure SQL Managed Instance via On-Premises Data Gateway and Virtual Network Data Gateway, ensuring secure and efficient data replication.
Learn more with Introducing Database Mirroring supports sources behind a Firewall announcement.
Introducing Mirroring for Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server
Database Mirroring now supports replication of your Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server into OneLake in Microsoft Fabric! In addition to Mirroring for Snowflake, Azure SQL DB, CosmosDB, and Azure SQL managed instance. With this newest offering for Database Mirroring, you can now continuously replicate data in near real-time from your Flexible Server instance to Fabric OneLake.
This enables seamless data integration, allowing you to leverage Fabric’s analytics capabilities while ensuring your PostgreSQL data remains up to date. By mirroring your PostgreSQL data into Fabric, you can enhance reporting, analytics, and machine learning workflows without disrupting your operational database.
Learn more with Introducing Mirroring for Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server announcement.
Mirroring for CI/CD general availability
Mirroring in Fabric supporting Continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) is now generally available! CI/CD is a critical feature for all enterprises, which enhance the efficiency and reliability of your development workflows.
With this feature, you can integrate Git for source control and utilize ALM Deployment pipelines, streamlining the deployment process and ensuring seamless updates to your database mirroring and open mirroring items running in Fabric.
Learn more with the CI/CD for Mirrored Database documentation.
Mirroring now supports Workspace monitoring
Workspace monitoring is an observability feature in Microsoft Fabric that enables developers and admins to access detailed logs and performance metrics of their workspaces.
Mirroring in Fabric supports operation logs in workspace monitoring to provide a more comprehensive monitoring experience your mirrored databases. You now leverage these logs to monitor execution and performance of your mirrored database, including data replication, table changes, mirroring status, failures, and replication latency for mirrored databases and tables.
Once the monitoring of your workspace is enabled, the mirrored database execution logs will automatically be ingested into the monitoring KQL database. Then you will have full access to a comprehensive monitoring experience.
- Derive insights on-demand: Query the granular operation logs directly using KQL in the monitoring database to get instant access to the information you need.
- Build customized monitoring dashboards: Create Real-Time Dashboards or Power BI reports against the data in the monitoring database, tailored to your needs.
- Set up alerting: Set up alerts based on the logs and metrics you’re tracking.
To learn more, refer to the Mirrored database operation logs documentation.
Mirroring now supports replicating source schemas
Mirroring in Fabric now supports replicating source schemas. Once replication is enabled, your source database schema hierarchy is preserved in the mirrored database. This ensures that your data remains consistently organized across different services, allowing you to consume it using the same logic in SQL analytics endpoint, Spark Notebooks, semantic models, and other references to the data.
To learn more, refer to the Schema support with Mirroring in Microsoft Fabric documentation.
Delta column mapping support for Mirroring
Mirroring in Fabric now supports Delta column mapping which is a feature of Delta tables that allows users to include spaces and special characters such as ,;{}()\n\t=. in the tables column names. With this capability, you can now mirror from table columns containing spaces or special characters in names can now be replicated from your source databases.
To learn more, refer to the Delta column mapping support with Mirroring in Microsoft Fabric documentation.
Open Mirroring UI enhancements and CSV file support
Open Mirroring in Microsoft Fabric is designed to be extensible, customizable, and open. It is a powerful feature that extends Mirroring in Fabric based on the open Delta Lake table format. This capability enables any applications and data ISVs to write change data directly into a Mirrored Database in Microsoft Fabric based on the open mirroring public APIs and approach.
Since the announcement at Microsoft Ignite in November 2024, we have continued to improve our end-to-end in-product experience for Open Mirroring. With these new enhancements, you can now create a Mirrored database and start uploading or dragging and dropping parquet and CSV files.
These changes will make it easier than ever to get started with building your own Open Mirror source.
To learn more, refer to the Open Mirroring UI enhancements and CSV support to help you get started today announcement.
Mirroring for Azure SQL Database now supports tables without primary keys and reduced SQL roles
Since becoming generally available, Mirroring for Azure SQL Database has been a game-changer, letting you replicate data seamlessly from your Azure SQL DB into OneLake in Microsoft Fabric. We’re excited to introduce several upgrades to Mirroring for Azure SQL Database to make it easier than ever to mirror your Azure SQL DB data.
Mirror tables without primary keys – This feature allows you to mirror tables even if they don’t have a primary key and offers more flexibility for your data replication needs.
Setup your Mirrored database with reduced SQL roles – We have simplified your setup process keeping in mind principles of least privileges. This enhancement allows mirroring with reduced SQL permissions, making it more secured and less complex.
To learn more, refer to the Exciting new features for Mirroring for Azure SQL Database in Microsoft Fabric announcement.
New region expansion for Mirroring in Fabric
To meet your increasing demand for Mirroring in Microsoft Fabric, we have expanded its support to include three additional regions: Central US, Poland Central, and Italy North.
Learn more with Fabric regions that support Mirroring documentation.
Free Mirroring compute and storage for replicas in OneLake
The Fabric compute and OneLake storage up to a capacity-based limit are free for Database and Open Mirroring.
Storage for replicas is free up to a limit based on the capacity size. Mirroring offers a free terabyte of mirroring storage for every capacity unit (CU) you have purchased. For example, if you purchase an F64 capacity, you get 64 free terabytes worth of storage, exclusively used for mirroring. OneLake storage is billed if free Mirroring storage limit is exceeded, or when the capacity is paused.
For more information, refer to Microsoft Fabric Pricing.
Mirroring compute in Fabric is free and does not consume capacity, it is used to replicate your data into Fabric OneLake. Requests to OneLake as part of the mirroring process consume capacity as normal OneLake compute consumption. The compute for querying data using SQL, Power BI, or Spark is charged at regular rates.
To learn more, refer to the Cost of Mirroring documentation.
Mirroring in Microsoft Fabric Roadmap
The Mirroring team has taken your feedback into account and is continuing to innovate with amazing features to make Mirroring in Microsoft Fabric the easiest way for you to bring your data into Microsoft Fabric.
We’ve made several exciting announcements today with the addition of Mirroring for Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server is now generally available. Many sources and features will be coming soon to further enhance Mirroring in Microsoft.
We look forward to hearing more of your ideas and what you need to run Mirroring in your production workload, please add your Fabric Ideas.
Stay tuned to our Mirroring Roadmap for all the new data sources and feature updates.
