Azure Data Factory Components

Azure Data Factory is a Microsoft-hosted extract, transform, and load (ETL) service that helps developers combine on-premises SQL Server and Azure-hosted data by simplifying the processing of disparate data formats.

The illustration shows an example where an organization’s Azure Data Factory installation (middle) receives data from an on-premises enterprise resource planning (ERP) database (top left) and social media posts stored in Azure HDInsight (bottom left).

An Azure Data Factory installation can have one or more Data Factories, each of which is isolated from the other Data Factories and administered independently (for example, by one of the subscriber’s business units). A Data Factory includes one or more workflows with the following components:

Linked services provide access to data or processing capabilities, such as Azure SQL Database, on-premises SQL Server, and HDInsight (Hadoop). In the example, two linked services are data sources, the organization’s ERP database and HDInsight. The output goes to two linked services: an on-premises data warehouse and an Azure SQL database, which are accessed by an on-premises dashboard and the Power BI analysis and reporting service, respectively.