What is a dacpac?

Key Takeaways

A DAC pack is a database model packaged into a portable format. So DAC for a data application framework package takes a database model or all of the objects, tables, store procedures, views and the relationships such as columns, foreign keys or the columns referenced within store procedures and combines them all up into what is essentially XML zipped together. But the power of a DAP pack comes from the tooling around it, such as the SQL package CLI, where you can publish DACP packs to databases, updating that database to match the DACP pack no matter where it starts from. The tooling calculates the difference that needs to occur so the database matches the DAC pack. But you can also create DAC packs by extracting them out of databases. So that DAP pack being super portable means that you can ship them anywhere to do your database deployments.