SQL Server

Fivetran supports SQL Server database as a destination.

Fivetran supports SQL Server as both a database connector and a destination. Integrating your SQL Server as a destination is the same as integrating it as a source connection. See our SQL Server database documentation for more information.

SQL Server is not typically used as a destination because it is a row-based database more suited to transactional use-cases. Large analytical querying is much faster on columnar warehouses. SQL Server, however, can be effective as a warehouse for smaller data volumes.

Supported implementations

Fivetran supports connecting with four different SQL Server implementations:

We only support the Enterprise and Standard editions of SQL Server.

Supported deployment models

We support the SaaS and Hybrid deployment models for all SQL Server implementations.

You must have an Enterprise or Business Critical plan to use the Hybrid Deployment model.

Type transformation mapping

The data types in your SQL Server database follow Fivetran's standard data type storage.

We use the following data type conversions:

Fivetran Data Type	Destination Data Type	Notes
BOOLEAN	BIT
SHORT	SMALLINT
INT	INTEGER
LONG	BIGINT
BIGDECIMAL	DECIMAL, DOUBLE PRECISION, or STRING	Fivetran maps BIGDECIMAL to a destination data type based on the column precision and scale. For more information about BIGDECIMAL data type mapping and transformation, see our How Does Fivetran Handle BIGDECIMAL Data? article.
FLOAT	REAL
DOUBLE	DOUBLEPRECISION
LOCALDATE	DATE
LOCALDATETIME	DATETIME2
INSTANT	DATETIMEOFFSET	For source connections created before March 26, 2020, we convert INSTANT to DATETIME2.
STRING	NVARCHAR
JSON	NVARCHAR
BINARY	VARBINARY

Setup guide

Follow our step-by-step setup guides for specific instructions on how to set up your SQL Server database as a destination:

Primary key column limitations

Fivetran has the following limitations on the size of primary key columns:

Fivetran imposes a limitation on the maximum size of a single STRING primary key column at 256 bytes.
SQL Server imposes limitations on the key columns. See Microsoft's documentation for a complete list of maximum capacity specifications for SQL Server.

Data load costs

Whether you are self-hosting SQL Server or using a managed service, you will not be charged extra when we load data into your database.

Collation

By default, Fivetran uses the latin1_general_bin collation for your SQL Server destination. The latin1_general_bin collation is case-sensitive. However, you can change the collation using {<col_name>} COLLATE {<collation_of_your_choice>} in your downstream queries while sorting or comparing your data. For example:

    SELECT {<col_name>} FROM {<fivetran_replicated_table>}
    ORDER BY {<col_name>} COLLATE {<collation_of_your_choice>};

Using custom collations in downstream queries may negatively impact the performance of your SQL Server database.

Character encoding

SQL Server stores string data in NVARCHAR columns using UTF-16 encoding.

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