Is Fabric a Reliable Service or a Ripped Resource?

Over the last few weeks, I've noticed a few complaints from different friends and customers about issues with Microsoft's Fabric service. I had assumed these were isolated incidents in just a few places, and customers were being refunded according to an SLA. Then I saw Joey D'Antoni's post this week about Fabric going down. It lists quite a few of the incidents in June, including a few global ones.

However, the most surprising thing in the post was this link, noting Fabric doesn't have a dedicated SLA. Instead, it's under the general Microsoft support agreement, meaning your organization needs to have a support plan to get help. I think that makes some sense, but I'd really expect that a data service in the cloud, including an analytic service that touts itself as real-time, would have a high SLA. Some agreement on the order of 4 9s at least, if not 5.

For those of you who think you can do better on premises, I'll remind you that four 9s mean you get 52 minutes of downtime a year, or 1 minute a week (roughly). Five 9s is 5 minutes a year, and the weekly calculation doesn't matter. I've had systems run for a year, but a lot, and not a lot of databases, especially with patching 6 times a year. This year, with AI (my guess) finding lots of holes and GDR releasing quite often, I would guess that three nines is out the window for most SQL Server systems that aren't HA clustered in some way.

As a point of reference, Denny notes that Azure SQL database, Business Critical, has a four-and-a-half 9s level of reliability and financial refunds for costs if that's exceeded. You will need some sort of business insurance if you worry about revenue issues, but my guess is that most of us live with the downtime and work around it (and hopefully, plan for it).

I've been skeptical of Fabric (outside of Power BI). It feels cobbled together, so many issues are reported, and I feel like it's immature. If I were working on a new analytics project, and we didn't have a solution, I might PoC it, but I'd be more likely to consider Databricks, Snowflake, or Redshift rather than Fabric.

Perhaps you have a different view, or you have had success with Fabric. I know some people who have, but it seems one-sey two-sey and not commonplace. There seem to be so many workarounds and issues; it makes me skeptical that Fabric is really ready for primetime if Microsoft won't stand behind it. Databricks only gives credit up to three 9s, but if they fall below 95%, they issue a 100% credit. Snowflake offers four 9s.

I feel that if Microsoft were confident in their reliability, they'd offer refunds if they didn't perform.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

This week host and Turing Post founder Ksenia Se threaded the latest news into a single argument: AI is moving out of conversation and into the operational loops where...

The following article originally appeared on Addy Osmani’s blog site and is being republished here with the author’s permission. Coding agents are extraordinarily good now, and getting better fast....

Ivan Palomaras Carrascosa groups things together: ...

SQL Server 2025's new ZSTD backup compression is a...

Aaron Bertrand has a lot of jobs: In the first few...

In my earlier post, I covered how to mirror Azure ...

We’re discontinuing our apps (not the First Resp...

(Warning: This blog post is non-technical but purely personal. In my leukemia diary, I write openly about my current health issues. This blog might be triggering for people who...

Have you been thinking about migrating your reporting to Microsoft Fabric or Snowflake but you have no idea what it would actually cost? ?? That’s the scariest thing, and... The...

If you work with data pipelines, SQL, notebooks, or machine learning models, a Mac with Apple Silicon is genuinely one of the best machines you can have as a... The...

Apple raised prices on Macs, iPads, and other devi...

With Fabric Mirroring, Microsoft is promoting a ni...

Over the past year, I’ve frequently blogged abou...

Microsoft Fabric is software-as-a-service platform...

Learn T-SQL With Erik: Controlling Memory Grants C...

PostgreSQL 13 made hash aggregation memory-safe by allowing it to spill to disk — but that safety introduced a surprise regression for some queries on upgrade.

Amid the AI frenzy, there is a lot of conversation about how business users will use agentic chat to answer business questions rather than interactive, dashboard-style reports. Is there...

Microsoft introduced Read-Only Routing to Always O...

Part 2: Using the Companies House API Welcome back following part 1… Getting a list of companies via Python – Advanced Filtering. This example will look at the transport...

Last week, The Register ran a line about SQL Serve...

This is a fascinating explotation of how LLMs fall for prompt injection attacks. It turns out that they learn to recognize the style of text in different role/instruction blocks,...

Meta pauses MCI after private conversations and em...

A database of almost a million passports from arou...

Anthropic accused Alibaba-linked operators of extr...

In a recent LinkedIn post, a poster had a novel idea. Say you have a query that has an OR condition. Usually the OR condition in question are related...

Back in March I wrote about a SESSION_CONTEXT bug that lies to you in parallel plans, with wrong results or AV dumps, no error, no warning. At the time...

2026 T-SQL wish list covering native Parquet imports, arrays, OVERLAPS, simpler licensing, and cloud storage — features SQL Server still needs.… The post 5 T-SQL features that should already exist...

If you’re building a large INSERT statement us...

Way back in December of 2009, Adam Machanic publis...

Tech layoffs are accelerating as companies invest heavily in AI, raising questions about automation, over-hiring, and corporate accountability.

China’s 360 says its Yitian Tulong AI cybersecur...

Orbital data centers may eventually support AI and...

AI agents are moving beyond individual productiv...

Realbotix is deploying Optio and a humanoid robot ...

Here’s a problem you probably didn’t solve in school: You’re an ambitious young plumber from Brooklyn in a world inhabited by violent human-size mushrooms called Goombas. The love of...

The Uncomfortable Thought Every techie I know has one. A box. Or a stack of boxes. Humming away in a cupboard, under the stairs, in the garage, in the spare...

“Don’t aim to have others like you; aim to hav...

Here is a piece that many people miss when they wi...

Code formatting can be a touchy subject. Sometimes...