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
For very large one-time migrations, consider combining ADF with Azure Data Box or ExpressRoute to reduce transfer time over the public internet.
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