---
title: "SQL Server"
description: "Connecting Materialize to a SQL Server database for Change Data Capture (CDC)."
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menu:
  main:
    parent: 'ingest-data'
    identifier: 'sql-server'
    weight: 15
---

## Change Data Capture (CDC)

Materialize supports SQL Server as a real-time data source. The [SQL Server source](/sql/create-source/sql-server/)
uses SQL Server's change data capture feature to **continually ingest changes**
resulting from CRUD operations in the upstream database. The native support for
SQL Server Change Data Capture (CDC) in Materialize gives you the following benefits:

* **No additional infrastructure:** Ingest SQL Server change data into Materialize in
    real-time with no architectural changes or additional operational overhead.
    In particular, you **do not need to deploy Kafka and Debezium** for SQL Server
    CDC.

* **Transactional consistency:** The SQL Server source ensures that transactions in
    the upstream SQL Server database are respected downstream. Materialize will
    **never show partial results** based on partially replicated transactions.

* **Incrementally updated materialized views:** Incrementally updated Materialized
    views are considerably **limited in SQL Server**, so you can use Materialize as
    a read-replica to build views on top of your SQL Server data that are
    efficiently maintained and always up-to-date.

## Supported versions

Materialize supports replicating data from SQL Server 2016 or higher with Change
Data Capture (CDC) support.

## Integration Guides

- [Self-hosted SQL Server](/ingest-data/sql-server/self-hosted/)

## Considerations

{{% include-md file="shared-content/sql-server-considerations.md" %}}