Tomaz Kastrun continues an advent of SQL Server 2025. Day 20 takes a look at change event streaming:
Change event streaming (CES) is data integration capability that streams SQL Server data changes directly into Azure Event hubs. It captures and publishes incremental changes of data to an Azure Event Hubs destination in almost near real-time. Captured changes are insert, updates and deleted (DML) and are sent to Azure Event hubs as a serialized JSON (CloudEvent) and streamed to Azure event hub.
CES can be used for multiple different use-cases, like monitoring, auditing, event-driven system on top of your on-prem database with minimal overhead and changes to database, for synchronising data across systems (platforms, on-prem and cloud solutions, etc.) and many more.
We have looked into the settings of SQL server and generating SAS token. And now we will need to set the needed Azure services.
Yes, it does cost extra money because of the Azure connection, but as long as you don’t have a mandate to be 100% on-premises, I think Change Event Streaming has the potential to be quite powerful for providing data between systems. This is exactly the sort of thing that Event Hubs (or other log-based systems similar to Apache Kafka) do quite well.