Azure Data Factory is a cloud-based data integration service that allows you to create data-driven workflows for orchestrating data movement and transforming data at scale. It is a managed cloud service that is built for complex hybrid extract-transform-load (ETL), extract-load-transform (ELT), and data integration projects. Some key features of Azure Data Factory include:
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Data Integration: Azure Data Factory provides a data integration and transformation layer that works across your digital transformation initiatives. It enables you to integrate all your data with more than 90 built-in connectors to acquire data from big data sources such as Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, and HDFS; enterprise data warehouses such as Oracle Exadata and Teradata; SaaS apps such as Salesforce, Marketo, and ServiceNow; and all Azure data services.
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Pipelines: Azure Data Factory allows you to create and schedule data-driven workflows (called pipelines) that can ingest data from disparate data stores. A pipeline consists of a group of activities, such as data movement activity and data transformation activity using SQL.
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Monitoring: Azure Data Factory allows you to monitor all your activity runs visually and improve operational productivity by setting up alerts proactively to monitor your pipelines.
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Security: Azure Data Factory provides several security features, including integration with Azure Active Directory for authentication and authorization, encryption of data at rest, and support for private endpoints that are supported by various Azure data stores.
Azure Data Factory simplifies hybrid data integration at an enterprise scale and enables citizen integrators and data engineers to use it for a rich variety of use cases, such as data engineering, operational data integration, analytics, ingesting data into data warehouses, and more.
