Purview is Microsoft’s data governance product, and its Unified Catalog includes data quality. Whether it covers your SQL Server depends on where that SQL Server runs.
What Microsoft’s table says
From Data Quality Supported Sources, updated April 9, 2026 and checked November 3, 2026:
| Source | Data profiling | Data quality scan | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| SQL Server | No | Yes | On-premises infrastructure |
| Oracle | No | Yes | On-premises infrastructure |
| Azure SQL Database | Yes | Yes | |
| Azure SQL Managed Instance | Yes | Yes | |
| Azure Synapse (serverless and data warehouse) | Yes | Yes | |
| Fabric | Yes | Yes | Lakehouse, shortcuts, mirroring |
So on-prem SQL Server gets rules and scores, but no data profiling. Purview can’t look at an on-prem column and tell you what it contains; you decide every rule.
What else to know
Connectivity. Getting an on-prem SQL Server into the Purview Data Map takes a self-hosted integration runtime on a machine that can reach it. Microsoft’s guide supports SQL Server 2005 and later, with SQL authentication or Windows authentication.
Billing. Microsoft’s billing page says data quality for on-premises sources uses the Basic SKU. Purview charges by data governance processing unit, about 0.02 per rule per run on a million-row Azure SQL table in Microsoft’s own examples. See what Purview Data Quality costs.
Where it runs. Purview is a Microsoft cloud service, and its data quality scores and results live in Purview.
If you need data profiling on on-prem SQL Server
DataOps TestGen fills that gap. It runs on your own server, connects to SQL Server 2019 and later with a read-only SQL login, profiles 55 characteristics per column, and generates tests from 34 test types. Results stay in TestGen’s database on your infrastructure. SQL Server 2017 is available by request.
The two don’t compete for the same job. Purview catalogs, classifies, and governs across the Microsoft estate. TestGen writes and runs the tests. In DataKitchen’s benchmark, covering 20 tables and 1,000 columns took 2,526 tests: two steps in TestGen, about 1,250 hours by hand.
See the TestGen vs Purview comparison, or start at the Purview install page to run TestGen beside Purview.