Azure Data Factory Matures and Eases Migration

Azure Data Factory is a Microsoft-hosted service used to automate the integration and transformation of disparate data sources for use by business intelligence (BI), reporting, analysis, and other applications. A V2 update currently in preview improves development for complex tasks, enhances performance to reduce cost, and provides a migration path for moving SQL Server Integration Services packages to the hosted service. However, the service still has limitations compared to Integration Services on-premises, and some features require other Azure services.

Data Factory Overview

Azure Data Factory is a Microsoft-hosted extract, transform, and load (ETL) service that helps developers automate data integration and transformation from on-premises and Azure-hosted sources.

Organizations routinely create ETL workflows to combine data from multiple sources. For example, ETL workflows might extract data from enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and e-commerce systems, transform the data into a standard format, and then load the data into a data warehouse for financial and demand analysis. Developers create ETL workflows either with an ETL tool or custom programming.