Data type emulation

Data type differences are a major source of incompatibility when migrating from Synapse Analytics to Fabric Warehouse.

Synapse supports a broad set of SQL Server-compatible types, including Unicode and legacy data types, while Fabric Warehouse uses a simplified, optimized type system tailored for distributed analytics.

Many commonly used types in Synapse — such as NVARCHAR, NTEXT, and DATETIMEOFFSET — are not supported or behave differently in Fabric. These differences can lead to deployment failures or unexpected runtime behavior if not properly handled.

SQL Tran automatically resolves these incompatibilities by converting unsupported Synapse data types into their closest Fabric equivalents.

For example, NVARCHAR is translated into VARCHAR with doubled length to maintain character capacity under UTF-8 encoding, and MONEY is converted to a fixed-precision DECIMAL type.

This intelligent translation ensures that migrated schemas retain their original behavior without requiring manual intervention — a process that would be time-consuming and error-prone if done by hand.

By automating data type adjustments across all objects in the database, SQL Tran significantly reduces migration effort and risk, enabling fast and reliable transitions to Fabric.

(For more information, see the following emulation reference page: Data types)

---

Code example

Synapse Analytics:

CREATE TABLE SampleDataTypes (
    ID INT NOT NULL,
    Name NVARCHAR(100),
    Description NTEXT,
    CreatedAt DATETIMEOFFSET,
    RegisteredAt DATETIME,
    BirthDate DATE,
    LastLogin DATETIME2,
    Score FLOAT,
    Balance MONEY,
    IsActive BIT,
    Document VARBINARY(MAX),
    UserID UNIQUEIDENTIFIER,
    PriorityLevel TINYINT
);

Fabric Warehouse (generated by SQL Tran):

CREATE TABLE SampleDataTypes (
    ID INT NOT NULL,
    Name VARCHAR(200) /* SQLTRAN FIX: NVARCHAR(100) */,
    Description VARCHAR(MAX) /* SQLTRAN FIX: NTEXT */,
    CreatedAt DATETIME2(6) /* SQLTRAN FIX: DATETIMEOFFSET */,
    RegisteredAt DATETIME2(6) /* SQLTRAN FIX: DATETIME */,
    BirthDate DATE,
    LastLogin DATETIME2(6) /* SQLTRAN FIX: DATETIME2 */,
    Score FLOAT,
    Balance DECIMAL(19,4) /* SQLTRAN FIX: MONEY */,
    IsActive BIT,
    Document VARBINARY(MAX),
    UserID UNIQUEIDENTIFIER,
    PriorityLevel SMALLINT /* SQLTRAN FIX: TINYINT */
);

---

Training video example

In the example shown, SQL Tran automatically transforms the data type NVARCHAR(50) to VARCHAR(100).

The length is doubled to maintain character capacity under UTF-8 encoding, ensuring compatibility with Fabric’s storage system.

All other attributes are carefully adjusted to align with Fabric's requirements.

Data type adjustments in translated SQL