Tag Archive: Azure Data Factory

  • RDP to Azure Batch Service Compute Nodes

    Did you know it’s now possible to RDP to your Azure Batch Service compute nodes? I’ve used the batch service to handle the compute for my Azure Data Factory custom activities for a while now. Which I’ve basically been doing blindly because the code execution and logging is provided to ADF, with no visibility to the underlying pool of VM’s doing the work. Well, no more is this the case! In the Azure portal go to your Batch…

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  • What’s New in Azure Data Factory Version 2 (ADFv2)

    I’m sure for most cloud data wranglers the release of Azure Data Factory Version 2 has been long overdue. Well good news friends. It’s here! So, what new features does the service now offer for handling our Azure data solutions?… In short, loads! In this post, I’ll try and give you an overview of what’s new and what to expect from ADFv2. However, I’m sure more questions than answers will be raised here. As developers we…

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  • Chaining Azure Data Factory Activities and Datasets

    As I work with Azure Data Factory (ADF) and help others in the community more and more I encounter some confusion that seems to exist surrounding how to construct a complete dependency driven ADF solution. One that chains multiple executions and handles all of your requirements. In this post I hope to address some of that confusion and will allude to some emerging best practices for Azure Data Factory usage. First a few simple questions: Why is…

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  • Passing Parameters to U-SQL from Azure Data Factory

    Let’s try and keep this post short and sweet. Diving right in imagine a scenario where we have an Azure Data Factory (ADF) pipeline that includes activities to perform U-SQL jobs in Azure Data Lake (ADL) Analytics. We want to control the U-SQL by passing the ADF time slice value to the script, hopefully a fairly common use case. This isn’t yet that intuitive when constructing the ADF JSON activity so I hope this post will save…

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  • Using Azure Data Factory Configuration Files

    Like most things developed its very normal to have multiple environments for the same solution; dev, test, prod etc. Azure Data Factory is no exception to this. However, where it does differ slightly is the way it handles publishing to different environments from the Visual Studio tools provided. In this post we’ll explore exactly how to create Azure Data Factory (ADF) configuration files to support such deployments to different Azure…

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  • Azure Data Lake Authentication from Azure Data Factory

    rereTo set the scene for the title of this blog post lets firstly think about other services within Azure. You’ll probably already know that most services deployed require authentication via some form of connection string and generated key. These keys can be granted various levels of access and also recycled as required, for example an IoT Event Hub seen below (my favourite service to play with). Then we have other services like SQLDB that…

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  • Creating Azure Data Factory Custom Activities

    When creating an Azure Data Factory (ADF) solution you’ll quickly find that currently it’s connectors are pretty limited to just other Azure services and the T within ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) is completely missing altogether. In these situations where other functionality is required we need to rely on the extensibility of Custom Activities. A Custom Activity allows the use of .Net programming within your ADF pipeline.…

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