A primer on Azure Data Factory

Azure Data Factory is a fully managed, highly available, highly scalable, and easy-to-use tool for creating integration solutions and implementing ETL phases. Data Factory helps you to create new pipelines in a drag and drop fashion using a user interface, without writing any code; however, it still provides features to allow you to write code in your preferred language.

There are a few important concepts to learn about before using the Data Factory service, which we will be exploring in more detail in the following sections:

• Activities: Activities are individual tasks that enable the running and processing of logic within a Data Factory pipeline. There are multiple types of activities. There are activities related to data movement, data transformation, and control activities. Each activity has a policy through which it can decide the retry mechanism and retry interval.
• Pipelines: Pipelines in Data Factory are composed...