ADF Service or Azure Data Factory is mainly used to automate retrieving and copying data between relational and non-relational data sources hosted on the cloud or a local datacenter.
We can understand it well by the following scenario:
Nowadays, we have to deal with huge amounts of data, and we know that this data comes from different sources. Suppose we have to move this particular data to the cloud, so we have to follow certain things to move this data.
The data we get from different sources can be in a different formats. These different sources will transfer or channel the data in different ways. When we bring this data to the cloud or particular local storage, we must ensure that this data is well managed. So, we have to transform the data and delete unnecessary parts.
We can do this task in a traditional data warehouse, but there are certain disadvantages. Sometimes, we have to use some custom applications to deal with all these processes individually, which is time-consuming, and integrating all these sources is a tedious job. We figure out a way to automate this process or create proper workflows to deal with all these problems. That's why Azure Data Factory is required. It automates the complete process into a more manageable or organizable manner. Azure Data Factory provides amazing tools such as the ELT tool for data ingestion in most Big Data solutions.
