Today I’m excited to talk about the general availability of Azure Data Factory V2, as well as some new features that have been added over the last couple months. If you don’t know, Azure Data Factory Version 2 added some new features that V1 didn’t have.

With ADF V2 you get a browser-based interface using drag and drop technology; V1 was primarily done in the Visual Studio IDE. It also added triggers for scheduling, so you can schedule your jobs when required and in additional ways (which I’ll discuss further in a bit).

Some other features of ADF V2 that came out as it became generally available:

• Lift and Shift operations for your SSIS packages, so if you have SSIS packages local, you can now Lift and Shift those into compute with the integration runtime service in Data Factory.
• This also allows for cloud to cloud, cloud to prem, prem to prem and some third-party tools are supported within that as well.
• Control flow activities like link branching, looping, conditional execution and parameterization.
• Integration with HD Spark and Databricks for big data workloads and data science.

Some features that have come out more recently:

• Integration with Key Vault, which gives you the ability to encrypt keys and small secrets like passwords used for keys. You can create a Linked Service to a Key Vault and reference those needed passwords rather than having to store those in search or text files or a PowerShell script and have those open. So, you can use Key Vault to reference back and run workloads without having to expose those passwords.
• The ability to monitor Data Factory using OMS, Microsoft’s cloud-based management solution that helps you manage and protect your on-prem and cloud infrastructure. This is quick and easy to set up and allows you to reach in to different types of applications in Azure and give you additional visibility and control for things like log analytics, automation, data protection and recovery, as well as security and compliance.
• You can monitor the overall health of your Data Factories and be able to drill in, see the details and troubleshoot if you’re having problems. This is all enable through Azure Analytics, so you turn on your Azure Analytics and Data Factory, then hook those into your OMS suite and you can monitor it as that central management point.
• Event based triggering with integration through Data Factory. Now you have event driven architecture where you have a common data integration pattern that involves production. Instead of having to schedule a timed trigger, you can monitor a blob creation or deletion, add that file into there and you can trigger your pipeline based on that.

Azure Data Factory V2 is a neat technology and I’m interested to see where it goes as I’m sure that more features will be coming. If you have questions about Azure Data Factory or any of the new Azure resources, we are the people to talk with. We’re doing a lot of work with our clients using Azure tools and we’d love to talk to you about how we can get you using Azure in your organization.