Join us at FabCon Atlanta from March 16 - 20, 2026, for the ultimate Fabric, Power BI, AI and SQL community-led event. Save $200 with code FABCOMM.
Register now!Calling all Data Engineers! Fabric Data Engineer (Exam DP-700) live sessions are back! Starting October 16th. Sign up.
I'm trying to create a pipeline in Fabric, with a copy data step, but it is failing due to the following error:
"An exception occurred: DataSource.Error: Microsoft SQL: A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: Named Pipes Provider, error: 40 - Could not open a connection to SQL Server)"
I can connect to the server/database fine in Power BI Desktop, but it doesn't work in Fabric (which I believe eliminates any potential firewall issues).
I'm using authentication kind = Basic, and my username is in the format domain\username (I also tried username in the UPN format username@myorg.co.uk.
I've tried with "use encrypted connection checked and unchecked, (when switching to unchecked the error message became "connection could not be updated" and I'm still unable to proceed.
Another oddity is that there is a Power Bi Gateway source setup (and accessible to me) for this server/database, but for some reason Fabric won't recognise this, and it doesn't show up if I try to use an existing connection, hence I'm trying to setup a new connection.
Can anyone advise where I'm going wrong, I thought this would be straight forward.
Solved! Go to Solution.
Hey @Anonymous ,
at the current moment, the copy activity of pipelines does not support data sources leveraging an on-premises gateway, this is the article with the current limitations: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/data-factory/pipeline-limitations?wt.mc_id=DP-MVP-5003068
We are using a dataflow activity inside a pipeline, because dataflows gen 2 are already supporting data sources with a gateway connection.
Hopefully, this will help to tackle your challenge at the moment.
Regards,
Tom
We have one Warehouse management software LFS.underlying DB is MS SQL.I want to connect from fabric to this DB.What are the mandatory fileds in the following screen to connect
Hey @Anonymous ,
at the current moment, the copy activity of pipelines does not support data sources leveraging an on-premises gateway, this is the article with the current limitations: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/data-factory/pipeline-limitations?wt.mc_id=DP-MVP-5003068
We are using a dataflow activity inside a pipeline, because dataflows gen 2 are already supporting data sources with a gateway connection.
Hopefully, this will help to tackle your challenge at the moment.
Regards,
Tom
Join the Fabric FabCon Global Hackathon—running virtually through Nov 3. Open to all skill levels. $10,000 in prizes!
Check out the October 2025 Power BI update to learn about new features.