This milestone of Mirroring for Azure SQL Managed Instance in Fabric marks a significant step forward in our mission to provide seamless, near real-time data replication and integration capabilities for our users.
What is Mirroring in Fabric?
Mirroring in Fabric is a powerful feature that allows you to replicate data from various data sources such as your Azure SQL Managed Instance to Fabric’s OneLake. This ensures that your data is always up-to-date and readily available for advanced analytics, AI, and data science without the need for complex ETL processes.
How Fabric Mirroring works
Mirroring provides a modern way of accessing and ingesting data continuously and seamlessly from any database or data warehouse into OneLake in Microsoft Fabric. This is all in near real-time thus giving users immediate access to changes in the source! This ensures great reliability and performance with least amount of resource tax on the source database.
Moreover, unlike CDC, DDL’s like add/drop column are also supported on actively mirrored tables.
Once the data is mirrored into OneLake, it will be in analytics ready format, ready for immediate consumption across all Fabric experiences and features like Power BI with new Direct Lake mode, Data Warehouse, Data Engineering, Lakehouse, KQL Database, Notebooks and Copilots.
Mirroring - Setup, monitor, and seamless schema changes in Fabric
Accelerate data potential with your Mirrored Azure SQL data in OneLake
Once your Azure SQL Managed Instance data is mirrored, any Mirrored database can be queried and cross joined with other Mirrored databases, warehouses, or lakehouses in Fabric. As every analytics workload in Fabric works seamlessly with OneLake, your Azure SQL data in OneLake can be used with Notebooks to analyze and create models, while building Power BI reports leveraging Direct Lake mode and semantic models quickly and efficiently.
Mirroring Pricing
Mirroring for Azure SQL Managed Instance, same for all Mirrored databases, offers you with free compute and free storage based on the capacity size. For example, if you purchase an F64 capacity, you get 64 free terabytes worth of storage exclusively for mirroring. OneLake storage is charged only when the free Mirroring storage limit is exceeded. You can learn more about Mirroring and OneLake storage pricing Microsoft Fabric – Pricing.
Summary
Today, customers can mirror their Azure SQL Managed Instance data into OneLake and accelerate their data potential with all workloads in Fabric. Together with Mirroring for other sources like Azure SQL Database, SQL Server 2025 (in preview) and in-market versions SQL Server 2016-2022 (in preview), you can leverage the same Mirroring technology and trivial setup to bring your data estate into OneLake.
With Mirroring we’ve heard the following key benefits from our customers and partners:
- Reduced total cost of ownership.
- Zero costs, zero ETL and zero code.
- Faster time to operational data, information to derive insights.
Finally, please stay tuned to the Mirroring Roadmap for new data sources and feature updates.