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Azure Data Factory is a Microsoft cloud-based data integration service which helps to transfer data to & from Azure Data Lake, HDInsight, Azure SQL Database, Azure Machine Learning (Cognitive Services), Azure Blob Storage etc. It organizes & automates the movement and transformation of data. Azure Data Factory works across on-premises, cloud data sources as well as SaaS to extract, transform and finally load the data.
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Pipelines and activities in Azure
Azure Data Factory allows you to create data pipelines that move and transform data, and then run the pipelines on a specified schedule (hourly, daily, weekly, etc.).
What is a data pipeline?
A very attractive feature of ADF is that the service offers a holistic monitoring and management experience over these pipelines In a Data Factory solution, you create one or more data pipelines. A pipeline is a logical grouping of activities. They are used to group activities into a unit that together perform a task. To understand pipelines better, we need to understand an activity first.
What is an activity?
Activities define the actions to perform on your data. For example, you may use a Copy activity to copy data from one data store to another data store. Data Factory supports two types of activities: data movement activities and data transformation activities.
To learn more, click the link and follow aStep by Step Azure Data Factory Tutorials