Azure Data Factory Courts Excel and SQL Developers

• New Azure Data Factory Native mode capabilities help onboard existing data transformation processes and make the service accessible to more developers.
• Power Query support could help automate and scale up existing Excel and Power BI transformation processes.
• SQL scripting capabilities provide the option to migrate basic SQL queries and transformations.
• The Power Query and SQL features do not work with all supported data sources and capabilities of the service.

Azure Data Factory is a Microsoft cloud data integration service, a specialized environment for extract, transform, and load of data for reporting, analysis, bulk data transfer, or other tasks. Data Factory’s low-code deployment option, called Native mode, introduces data query and transformation features familiar to traditional Excel, Power BI, and SQL developers. They can help data specialists transition to Native mode and can help operationalize some processes that normally run locally.

Data Factory Overview

Data Factory provides enterprise-scale data integration and orchestration features. A Data Factory solution, called a pipeline, is composed of activities, which are steps that automate data integration, transformation, and movement of data. For example, a Data Factory pipeline might pull (extract) data from regional sales databases, summarize (transform) the data, and save (load) the results into a corporate data warehouse that is used to calculate daily sales performance metrics. The service can access data from multiple data stores, including on-premises, Azure-hosted, and third-party cloud database services.