Azure Data Factory Overview

Azure Data Factory is an enterprise-scale extract, transform, and load (ETL) service that helps automate data integration and transformation workloads. It can access data from multiple locations, including on-premises, Azure-hosted, and other database services. Data Factory offers quick deployment, scalability, and global reach.

Overview

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.

ETL tools are used to create pipelines (also called processes or workflows) that gather data from multiple sources, consolidate and clean the data, and then store the resulting dataset into a location. A key advantage of IT-managed ETL tools and pipelines is that they ensure users and applications have access to approved, timely data, and they remove the need for individual users to write their own complex queries.