Microsoft Fabric Data Factory: How to Begin Dataflow & Data Pipelines

Overview of Microsoft Fabrics Data Factory

A cloud-based solution for data transfer and transformation, Microsoft Fabric Data Factory is made to manage intricate data factory and ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) situations. Its goal is to offer an enterprise-grade, user-friendly, and robust data integration experience. Data Factory implements two principal high-level functionalities: dataflows and pipelines.

Using Data Factory, you can create dataflows and pipelines for the next generation of enterprise-scale data integration solutions.

Source: Microsoft

What is Dataflow?

One of the most important features of Microsoft Fabric is the ETL service in the cloud called Dataflow, which makes the following possible:

Data Extraction: Data is retrieved from multiple sources.

Transformation: The data undergoes the required modifications.

Loading: It inserts the changed data into the intended location.

These low-code interfaces let you load changed data into several destinations after applying over 300 data transformations and ingesting data from hundreds of sources.

The well-known Power Query experience that is now offered across several Microsoft products and services, including Excel, Power BI, Power Platform, Dynamics 365 Insights applications, and more, is used to build dataflows. Utilize a low-code, highly visual user interface (UI) to do joins, aggregations, data cleansing, custom transformations, and extensive other operations.

Data pipelines

Coordinating data ingestion and transformation is carried out via Microsoft Fabric Data Factory pipelines. Build intricate ETL and data factory operations with data pipelines to handle a wide range of activities at once. Data pipelines come with built-in control flow capabilities that let you create workflow logic with loops and conditionals.

Why to use Data Factory?

Seamless connectivity: over 170 data stores, encompassing cloud databases, analytics platforms, on-premises data sources, line of business apps, and more.

Next-generation Power BI dataflows (Dataflow Gen2): offering scalable data flows that operate on Fabric computation, as well as more than 300 pre-built data transformations, including AI transformations. The converted data can also be output into a variety of data destinations.

Data pipelines in Fabric:  Data pipelines allow us to execute a group of actions and combine them into a single workflow.

Built-in AI:  It makes common data integration activities faster and more automated.

Conclusion

A cloud-based solution called Microsoft Data Factory makes it possible to integrate and orchestrate data from several sources and destinations. It’s simple to get started with data analytics in Fabric thanks to the Dataflow Gen2 architecture, which combines several technologies to enable you to extract, convert, and load data into a variety of Fabric and Azure destinations with little to no code.

References

1. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-fabric
2. Microsoft Fabric documentation – Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn

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