SQL Server compatibility

SQL Server compatibility#

Querona emulates Microsoft SQL Server, so any client, tool or driver that connects to SQL Server connects to Querona with no extra configuration — Microsoft’s own built-in drivers just work. You keep your existing tools, drivers and skills; see Querona for SQL Server users for how that maps to your day-to-day work.

What’s compatible#

Querona’s emulation covers the SQL Server features that client tools and drivers rely on:

  • Metadata model — the metadata catalog, system views, system stored procedures and functions.

  • Authentication — Standard (Mixed Mode), Windows Integrated, and Microsoft Entra ID.

  • Encryption — full TLS encryption of client connections: Optional and Mandatory modes on TDS 7.x, and Strict mode on TDS 8.0.

  • Transact-SQL — the T-SQL dialect, including procedural constructs (IF, WHILE, DECLARE) and in-memory temporary tables.

  • Data types — SQL Server data types, with automatic conversion of source types into matching types.

  • Security — object-level permissions, row-level security and data masking.

  • Auditing — tracking, logging and reporting of events.

  • Job scheduling — the job model and its stored procedures; the SQL Server Agent equivalent is built into the engine, with no separate agent service to install or run.

  • TDS protocol — Tabular Data Stream 7.x and 8.0, as described in the Microsoft TDS documentation.

Note

The emulated SQL Server version (2012, 2019, 2022 or Azure SQL) is a convenience option you choose per session — it is used only to present and negotiate the TDS session. Querona does not use database compatibility levels, because it does not store data in a custom store of its own; it relies on the underlying engines.

No internal store to maintain#

Because Querona keeps no internal database structures of its own, there is no DBCC and no internal database maintenance to perform — in this respect it is closer to PolyBase and Microsoft Fabric than to SQL Server. Maintenance of the underlying sources and processing engines is done with their own native tools; where a source exposes maintenance through native SQL, that SQL can be run — and scheduled — through the qua_execute_provider_sql_on_connection stored procedure.

Verified tools and drivers#

Connectivity to Querona has been verified with widely used tools and technologies, including:

  • Apache Superset

  • DBeaver (JDBC)

  • Microsoft Office

  • Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio

  • Microsoft Azure Data Studio

  • Power BI

  • Qlik

  • Tableau

  • Targit

Generic data-access technologies:

  • ADO.NET

  • JDBC

  • OLEDB

  • ODBC

For connecting specific clients, see Client Connectivity.

See also#