Unlocking Insights Faster with Microsoft Fabric’s Mirroring Capabilities

Microsoft Fabric’s Mirroring feature offers a powerful, low-latency way to unify your data without the hassle of complex ETL pipelines. It allows continuous replication from Azure databases and external sources directly into OneLake, Fabric’s unified data lake making your data instantly queryable across the Fabric ecosystem.

Whether you're running Spark notebooks, building Power BI dashboards, or driving data engineering tasks, Mirroring simplifies access to live data and eliminates duplication and delays.

Why It Matters

Mirroring breaks down data silos by replicating both data and metadata in near real-time. It’s built on a SaaS foundation, supports familiar tools like SSMS and VS Code, and ensures secure, collaborative data sharing.

It removes the need for traditional ETL pipelines and ensures analytics-ready data is available instantly to users across business and technical teams.

Three Types of Mirroring in Fabric

Microsoft Fabric supports multiple mirroring methods to suit different needs:

• Database Mirroring for full replication of tables and data into OneLake.
• Metadata Mirroring to sync only schemas and catalog structures, reducing redundancy.
• Open Mirroring based on Delta Lake for developer-driven data integration via APIs.

Each approach is designed to ensure low-latency access, openness, and interoperability.

What You Can Do with Mirroring

With Mirroring, organizations can:

• Maintain governance using Unity Catalog and OneLake’s security model.
• Avoid costly data duplication and ETL jobs.
• Enable cross-functional collaboration by making the same datasets available to both data scientists and business users.

How It Works (At a Glance)

Mirroring is easy to configure. Link your Databricks workspace, select catalogs or tables to mirror, and Fabric handles the rest.

Mirrored tables appear in Fabric’s SQL Endpoint and are ready to query using T-SQL, Power BI, and other Fabric services—without requiring a live Databricks cluster.

Mirroring Azure Databricks Unity Catalog to Microsoft Fabric OneLake

The GA release of Mirroring brings real-time, secure, and ETL-free access to Databricks data in Fabric. With just a few clicks, users can mirror Unity Catalog tables into OneLake, enabling instant querying via Power BI and other Fabric tools. It supports open formats like Delta Parquet, ensures enterprise-grade governance, and allows CI/CD automation—eliminating data duplication and simplifying analytics across a unified lakehouse platform.

What’s New in the GA Release

Microsoft has introduced several enterprise-grade enhancements with the general availability of Mirroring:

• Support for firewall-enabled ADLS access.
• CI/CD automation through public APIs.
• Deeper integration with OneLake security controls.

These updates make Mirroring robust enough for enterprise-scale deployment.

What’s Next on the Roadmap?

Upcoming enhancements include:

• Delta Sharing and federated tables for broader collaboration.
• Streaming support and policy-aware mirroring with RLS and CLM.
• Greater integration across platforms for a truly unified analytics experience.

To explore all features, benefits, and future plans in detail, check out our blog on this topic.

At Quadrant Technologies, we help organizations simplify data access and strengthen governance by leveraging the latest innovations across the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform. To learn more or connect with our experts, contact us at marcomms@quadranttechnologies.com.

Appreciate Sumanth Juluru , Technical Architect at Quadrant Technologies, for sharing his valuable insights on this topic.