In Materialize, a [cluster](/concepts/clusters/) is an isolated
environment, similar to a virtual warehouse in Snowflake. When you create a
cluster, you choose the size of its compute resource allocation based on the
work you need the cluster to do, whether ingesting data from a source,
computing always-up-to-date query results, serving results to clients, or a
combination.

In this case, you'll create a dedicated cluster for ingesting source data from
your SQL Server database.

1. In the [SQL Shell](https: