Huge build size regression due to added broker support

[dallmair]

Describe the bug

We're using Microsoft.Data.SqlClient in a cloud service running on Linux x64 in containers. With the upgrade to the newly released version 6.1.6 (also happens with 7.0.2), our container size increased a lot.

#4288 added broker support for interactive Entra ID auth. To implement this, the Microsoft.Data.SqlClient.Extensions.Azure package gained a dependency on Microsoft.Identity.Client.Broker.

This is the crux: In a cloud service, we don't have interactive auth anyway, and the PR even explicitly states

Non-Windows: broker is never used.

Thus, it should be possible to have a build without all the binaries needed for broker support as that is all dead code in our case, but the build doesn't know and puts all the binaries there all the time.

To reproduce

Create a new .NET 10 console application project and add references to Microsoft.Data.SqlClient 7.0.1 and Microsoft.Data.SqlClient.Extensions.Azure 1.0.0. Compile the project and check the output directory size.

Then, upgrade the Microsoft.Data.SqlClient* dependencies to 7.0.2, rebuild the project, and check the output directory size again.

On my system (Release configuration):

Version	Size in bytes
7.0.1 + 1.0.0	15,607,664
7.0.2	78,921,330

To be fair, in a production build one would use dotnet publish --runtime linux-x64 which brings down the output to 48,494,987 bytes, but that's still a whopping 32 MiB more than with the previous version.

Expected behavior

I'm able to choose whether I want to have broker support or not by being able to install a dedicated package that adds broker support if needed.

Further technical details

Microsoft.Data.SqlClient version: 7.0.2
.NET target: .NET 10.0
SQL Server version: -
Operating system: -

Additional context
-

[github-actions]

🔍 Triage Summary

Check	Result
Issue type	Feature
Environment	All required environment details provided for investigation
Area	Area\Azure Connectivity
Duplicates	None found
Regression	Likely regression from v7.0.1 → v7.0.2 (introduced by #4288)

Analysis

PR #4288 added Windows Account Manager (WAM) broker support to Microsoft.Data.SqlClient.Extensions.Azure by adding a hard dependency on Microsoft.Identity.Client.Broker, which pulls in ~30–63 MB of additional native binaries. Since the PR itself states that broker support is never used on non-Windows platforms, this dependency is dead weight for Linux/macOS cloud services — causing a ~5× binary size increase (15.6 MB → 78.9 MB uncompressed, or +32 MiB with --runtime linux-x64 publish). The feature itself works correctly; the issue is that the broker dependency is unconditional rather than opt-in, which affects container size and deployment costs for all non-interactive service workloads. Severity: P2 — significant impact on cloud/container deployment scenarios.

Next Steps

• Assign to Copilot coding agent to investigate splitting broker support into a separate opt-in package (e.g., Microsoft.Data.SqlClient.Extensions.Azure.Broker) or using RID-specific/platform-conditional <PackageReference> in the .csproj/.nuspec to make Microsoft.Identity.Client.Broker a Windows-only dependency that does not flow to Linux/macOS publish outputs.
• Specifically investigate whether <PackageReference Include="Microsoft.Identity.Client.Broker" Condition="'$(RuntimeIdentifier)' == 'win-x64' ..." /> or <group targetFramework="... /runtime-windows/" /> in the nuspec can gate the transitive dependency, and validate that the existing WAM broker code paths still compile with a guard.
• Coordinate with the Enable WAM Broker support for Entra ID Auth modes #4288 authors (PR is targeted for Hotfix 7.0.3) to determine whether a fix can be included in 7.0.3 or should target 7.1.0.

Note: This triage summary is auto-generated by an AI agent. The analysis and suggestions above have not been verified by a human maintainer. Please treat as preliminary guidance only.

Generated by SqlClient Issue Auto-Triage for issue #4410 · 39.2 AIC · ⌖ 7.4 AIC · ⊞ 8.4K · ◷