As Azure Data Factory continues to evolve as a powerful cloud orchestration service we need to update our knowledge and understanding of everything the service has to offer. Mainly, so we can make the right design decisions when developing complex, dynamic solution pipelines. In this post I want to explore and share the reasons for … Continue reading Azure Data Factory – Web Hook vs Web Activity
Building on the excellent PowerShell Databricks module created by Gerhard Brueckl here, I've added another layer of code to recursively export all items in a given Databricks workspace using PowerShell. I accept this does need to be hardened as a PowerShell cmdlet on its own and added to a module. However, I wanted to share the … Continue reading PowerShell Export Databricks Workspace Items – Recurse
Microsoft recently announced that we can now make our Azure Data Factory (ADF) v2 pipelines even more dynamic with the introduction of parameterised Linked Services. This now completes the set for our core Data Factory components meaning we can now inject parameters into every part of our Data Factory control flow orchestration processes. Pipelines ✔ Activities … Continue reading Using Data Factory Parameterised Linked Services
Many moons ago and in a previous job role I wrote a post for creating an Azure Data Factory v1 Custom Activity here. According to Google Analytics this proved to be one of my most popular blog posts on that site. I therefore feel I need to do an update post with the same information … Continue reading Creating an Azure Data Factory v2 Custom Activity
There were many great announcements to come out of the Microsoft Ignite 2018 conference, but the main one for me was the introduction of Azure Data Factory Data Flow. As a business intelligence person with many years experience working with SSIS packages this new feature is very exciting! Since I first saw the mock up … Continue reading What is Azure Data Factory Data Flow?
Hey friends & SQL family, its been a great year of tech and events so far, but now with several big conferences planning next years agendas its time to think ahead. Below I've prepared titles and abstracts for talks I'd like to deliver to our awesome data platform community in 2019. 5x regular sessions. 2x … Continue reading Preparing My Community Sessions for 2019
Just a quick post friends following a talk I did on Azure Data Factory (ADF) v2 at SQL Saturday Manchester. In the talk I demonstrated using ADF more dynamically now version 2 supports expressions and parameters... Amongst other cool stuff I specifically showed how you could run your SSIS packages, scaled out across all the … Continue reading Execute All SSIS Packages in Parallel with ADFv2 Lookup and ForEach Activities
Hello friends, in this post I want to share with you a couple of methods I've developed for controlling the start up and stop of the Azure Data Factory (ADF) v2 SSIS Integration Runtime (IR) from your pipelines. This requirement came about mainly because of cost... The SSIS IR underneath is simply a cluster of … Continue reading How To Control the SSIS IR From Your ADFv2 Pipelines – Start/Stop
Hello friends, with this post I wanted to give you a quick 'how to' guide when working with the Azure Data Factory (ADF) v2 Until activity... Having implemented the activity several times in production I've repeatedly found the current Microsoft documentation here falling a little short in its explanations and examples. So, I've created my … Continue reading Using the ADFv2 Until Activity
This is just a quick post, mainly for my own reference. When working with code generated solutions we often need to convert datasets from SQL Server (T-SQL) data types to Azure Data Lake Analytics (U-SQL) data types. As you probably know U-SQL has a hybrid syntax of T-SQL and C# which uses .Net data types. … Continue reading T-SQL to U-SQL Data Type Conversion
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