Mirroring your Azure SQL Business Central Database

It was already in preview a couple of months ago. But know in Fabric you can mirror your Azure SQL database into Microsoft Fabric.

NB: be aware that the option is this in preview when writing this post and got limitations. Those limitations you can find here:
Limitations and behaviors for Fabric mirrored databases from Azure SQL Database (Preview) – Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn

The feature is just what is says it does. You can mirror your Azure SQL data into Microsoft Fabric. So if you update, delete or insert a record inside your Azure SQL database it is mirrored in near real time to Microsoft Fabric.

How can I enable it?

On your Azure SQL server you have to enable “System Assigned Managed Identity”:

Also “Public access” must be enable and the option “Allow Azure services and resources to access this server” must be on.

When you go to Microsoft Fabric and open the “Data Engineering” part and click on “New” you can pick already the “Mirrored Azure SQL Database (preview)” option:

Be aware that the option “Database Mirroring (preview)” in the Tenant settings of the admin portal must be turned on! Otherwise you cannot see the options.

When you choose the right option you get a nice walkthrough to put all your setting in it and also choose your credentials (Basic, Organizational or Service Principal):

When everything it OK it will load all the tables inside your Azure SQL database and you can choose to mirror everything or selected tables.

When it is connected you can see your Azure SQL Database inside your Fabric workspace:

You can also edit your tables later on and stop the mirroring but also monitor the replication.

And if you want to show the data you can go to your SQL analytics endpoint:

Limitations

As mentions there are some limitations for the mirroring part currently (see also the link in the top of the blog). But the most important limitations are:

• You can only sync 500 tables (standard Business Central has got 1597 tables (only BaseApp counted)
• Columns names with space, _  (underscore), – (hyphen), ( (Bracket), ) (Bracket) in the name cannot yet be mirrored inside Microsoft Fabric. Then you get an error and the whole table is not mirrored.
  And maybe as you know Business Central has got allot of it.

Conclusion

Mirroring your Azure SQL database is a very interesting feature and brings allot of good options to the table when it comes to analytics and Business Central data (and also other data).
The Fabric team is working on the “invalid character” in column names. And if that is fixed the door is also maybe open for Business Central online!