SQL database in Fabric

In the Ultra Transcenders books

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Each book explains SQL database in Fabric in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.

Terms in this definition

• Microsoft Fabric

  Analytics platform from Microsoft delivered as SaaS on top of OneLake, offering capabilities including Direct Lake and shortcuts.

• Schema

  The middle part of a Unity Catalog name (catalog.schema.table), grouping tables, views, volumes, functions and models inside a catalog. A grant on it covers everything in it now and later, and nothing inside can be reached without USE SCHEMA.

• Azure SQL Database

  Platform-as-a-service database offered as a single database or in an elastic pool, sized up to 4 TB or 128 TB on Hyperscale. SQL Agent, CLR and queries across databases aren't available.

• OneLake

  Built on Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, it is the one logical data lake for an entire Microsoft Fabric tenant, provisioned automatically, and the place where every Fabric workload keeps its data.

• WHERE

  Limits a SELECT, UPDATE or DELETE to just the rows meeting a condition. Omit it, and the statement hits every row.

• SQL analytics endpoint

  Read-only SQL access in Fabric to the data in a lakehouse. Power BI using DirectQuery through it performs more slowly than Direct Lake.

Related terms

• ADR

  A recovery design in the Database Engine. Changes are versioned inside the user database, in what's called a persistent version store, which makes rolling back almost immediate and recovery time constant. Azure SQL Database, SQL database in Fabric and Managed Instance have it permanently enabled.

• ALLOW_BUILTIN_TVF_IN_ALL_COMPAT_LEVELS

  Lets functions like REGEXP_SPLIT_TO_TABLE, REGEXP_MATCHES and OPENJSON be used whatever the database's compatibility level. It is a database scoped configuration, currently in preview, for SQL database in Fabric and Azure SQL Database.

• Automatic index management

  Lets the database add and remove indexes by itself to match the workload, through the CREATE_INDEX and DROP_INDEX automatic tuning options. You'll only find it in SQL database in Fabric and Azure SQL Database.

• CES

  Sends every row change in a stream group's tables to Fabric Eventstream or Azure Event Hubs, each as a CloudEvent. It's in preview for SQL database in Fabric, Managed Instance, Azure SQL Database and SQL Server 2025; delivery over AMQP was deprecated on 15 August 2026, with Kafka the recommended route.

• DacFx

  The Microsoft framework underneath SQL database projects, SqlPackage and schema comparison, which compiles SQL object definitions into a .dacpac package and deploys it to a target database. Both SQL database in Fabric and Fabric Data Warehouse are supported targets.

• RCSI

  With READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT ON, statements under READ COMMITTED see row versions from when they started and take no shared locks, so readers and writers stop blocking one another. SQL Server leaves it off by default; Azure SQL Database and SQL database in Fabric turn it on.

• Regular expression functions

  Built into T-SQL in SQL Server 2025, Azure SQL and SQL database in Fabric, and based on RE2, these let you match, validate, extract and replace text by pattern. The set comprises REGEXP_LIKE, REGEXP_COUNT, REGEXP_INSTR, REGEXP_SUBSTR, REGEXP_REPLACE, REGEXP_MATCHES and REGEXP_SPLIT_TO_TABLE.

• SHORTEST_PATH

  Used within MATCH, this graph function returns the fewest-hop route of any length linking two nodes. Supported by Azure SQL, SQL database in Fabric and SQL Server from 2019.