In this post, I am going to discuss the awesomeness that is the Data Factory. It does a bunch a cool stuff, but I am going to focus on this one.
Data Factory gives you the ability to choose certain tables and sync them into a PaaS SQL database, this can be important when you have an extremely large SQL database On-Prem with a large amount of data but you need to take advantage of Azure Machine Learning and not incur the costs of having the entire database inside of Azure.
You setup Data Factory to push only the tables you need, and then you can perform Machine Learning on just that data to give you the required outputs.
Some great info can be found here
I helped an organization to setup the following.
- Data Factory in Azure
- Install the Data Factory Gateway application on their network
- Push tables from their On-Prem SQL database to Azure through the firewall on port 443, thus keeping compliance.
A great way to test the capabilities of Azure with your Data without moving TONS of data.