Migrate Data with Azure Data Factory

Azure Data Factory is commonly used to migrate data from on-premises systems or other clouds into Azure, whether for a one-time lift-and-shift or an ongoing hybrid data integration strategy.

Planning a Migration

• Inventory source systems and estimate total data volume
• Decide between a one-time bulk migration and incremental/delta loads
• Choose the target store — Azure SQL Database, Data Lake, Synapse, or Cosmos DB

Tools ADF Provides for Migration

• Copy Data Tool — a wizard-driven interface for quick, large-scale data movement
• Self-hosted Integration Runtime — connects ADF securely to on-premises data sources
• Data Flows — for transforming data during migration without extra compute clusters
• Parameterized pipelines — to reuse a single pipeline across many tables or files

Best Practices

• Use partitioned parallel copy for large tables to speed up transfer
• Validate row counts and checksums after migration
• Enable logging and alerts to catch failures early
• Test with a subset of data before running the full migration