Fabric RTI 101: Database CES Sources

When we talk about Change Event Streams, or CES, we’re looking at a different layer of database activity than CDC.

CDC — Change Data Capture — focuses on row-level changes: inserts, updates, and deletes in your transactional tables. That’s very useful for analytics and replication. But there’s a lot more going on inside a database than just row changes.

CES captures the broader set of events that affect the structure and governance of the database itself. This includes things like schema changes — if someone adds a new column, drops a table, or creates an index. It also includes permission updates — for example, when access rights are granted or revoked. And it can even capture configuration changes or other metadata-level modifications.

Why does this matter? Because in many environments, especially regulated ones, you don’t just care about what data is changing — you also need visibility into how the platform itself is evolving.

If a developer alters a schema, or an administrator changes a security setting, that’s an event with governance and compliance implications. CES makes those changes visible in real time.

Monitoring and Auditing

This is especially important for monitoring and auditing. If someone accidentally drops an index on a production table, you want to know right away, not three days later when query performance tanks. If permissions are updated inappropriately, you want an alert before that creates a compliance issue.

Analogy

You can think of CDC as a cash register receipt — it tells you every sale that happened. CES, on the other hand, is like the security log of the store — who unlocked the doors, who changed the locks, who moved the shelves around. Both are important, but they capture different dimensions of activity.

CES complements CDC. Together, they provide a full picture: CDC shows you how the data changes, while CES shows you how the data environment itself changes. And for governance, monitoring, and compliance, that’s invaluable.
 

Learn more about Fabric RTI

If you really want to learn about RTI right now, we have an online on-demand course that you can enrol in, right now. You’ll find it at Mastering Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence

2026-02-18