Introduction to Azure Data Factory

By: Koen Verbeeck

Overview

Azure Data Factory is a managed, serverless data integration service hosted in the Microsoft Azure cloud. It allows you to visually build data pipelines to integrate data from over more than 90 built-in connectors. In short, it’s an ETL/ELT tool built for the cloud.

Outline

In this tutorial, we will go over the basics of Azure Data Factory and show you how you can create your first pipelines, but also how you can take advantage of the rich parameterization options to make truly metadata-driven pipelines. For the remainder of the tutorial, we will refer to Azure Data Factory as "ADF".

The high-level outline of the tutorial is as follows:

• Set-up of the environment
• Build your first pipeline
• What are linked services?
• What are datasets?
• What are activities?
• Building a pipeline manually
• Using parameters and metadata
• What are the integration runtimes?
• What are data flows?
• Scheduling and monitoring

You can use the outline on the left to browse the tutorial or use the arrows "Previous" and "Next".

Additional Information

• For more info on ADF, check out the tips What Is Azure Data Factory and Azure Data Factory Overview.
• If you’re used to working with SSIS, the tip Choosing Between SQL Server Integration Services and Azure Data Factory might be something for you.