So far, we have used on-premise technologies, such as SSIS or R. This short section steps out of an on-premises environment. As a growing amount of data is stored in the cloud, Microsoft introduced a cloud-based technology, Azure Data Factory (ADF), which is a technology intended for the following tasks:
- Data acquisition from a wide set of data sources, including on-premise data sources (E phase of ETL processes)
- Data transformations using several languages (T phase of ETL processes)
- Publishing data for further usage (L phase of ETL processes)
Reviewing the preceding bullet list, we can say that ADF is a cloud-based SSIS. Here, we also define sources of data, data manipulation, and the data storage destination. However, the technology background is completely different and terminology also differs from SSIS.
ADF is provided in two versions...
