Azure Data Factory v2 Developer Interface Launched

Its finally here!!

After being teased for nearly 4 months with all the great new functionality available in Azure Data Factory version 2 we finally have the tools to start developing it. Microsoft, it appears, have leap frogged my long standing request and feedback votes to support ADF templates in Visual Studio 2017 and gone for a complete overhaul of the JSON templates and project we got in VS2015 for ADFv1. We now have a fully functioning, rich, browser based graphical user interface for developing the service. One that is equipped with everything we need to easily exploit the power and features of ADFv2.

As data factory is an Azure platform as a service offering can we expect more browser based (cross platform) developer tools like this in the future? Being one of the lucky ones that’s been using the new UI already in private preview I certainly hope so. That said, we do still need the power of Visual Studio for local emulators and big code builds. Further discussions on this another time.

Moving on to the exciting stuff. What can we do with ADFv2 in the new UI. Well in short, everything! All the features I talked about in this past blog post (back in September) are available to use via the new interface. Plus a few more we didn’t know about.

SSIS Integration Runtime

The main attraction for ADFv2 is now of course, not just the new UI, but the ability to run SQL Server Integration Services packages. In case you were wondering how to get the SSIS IR in the new UI. Go to Connections (bottom left) > choose the Integration Runtimes tab > click New > choose Lift and Shift Existing SSIS Packages > complete the setup wizard.

Click to enlarge the below image.

There still isn’t an activity to call the packages directly that I’m aware of. But we can work around that with a stored procedure call to the Azure SQLDB.

I’ll leave it there for this post and let you play around with the new interface for yourself.

Many thanks for reading.