Hi @michaelgambling ,
Thank you for reaching out to the Microsoft Fabric Community forum and for looking into the SQL Server (CDC) connector in Microsoft Fabric Eventstreams.
As you mentioned, the connector currently needs the SQL instance to be publicly accessible, which can be a security issue for on-premises setups.
Depending on your real-time requirements, there are some secure and cost-effective alternatives:
For near real-time data (such as updates every few minutes), you can use Dataflows Gen2 with Self-hosted Integration Runtime (SHIR). This allows secure data transfer from your on-prem SQL Server without making it public, since SHIR runs inside your network and uses outbound connections.
If you need true real-time data, you can capture CDC data using Azure Data Factory or Synapse pipelines with SHIR, then send changes to Fabric Eventstreams via the REST API. This keeps your SQL Server private but may require some custom setup, like Azure Functions or Logic Apps.
If your organization uses Azure Arc, it can securely connect on-prem SQL Servers to Azure Event Hubs, which can then integrate with Fabric Eventstreams. This keeps your data secure, but may add some extra infrastructure management if Arc isn’t already in use.
Since you have up to 100 databases across 4 on-prem SQL Servers, SHIR can scale to handle this, but you may need to deploy multiple SHIR nodes or use load balancing for efficient processing.
Hope this helps. Please reach out for further assistance.
If this post helps, then please consider to Accept as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly and a kudos would be appreciated.
Thank you.
