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Data Pipelines and Dataflows in Fabric Data Factory

Reza Rad has two videos and posts for us. First up is a primer on data pipelines in Microsoft Fabric Data Factory:

The Pipeline comes from Azure Data Factory. A Pipeline is a group of activities bundled together into a workflow. For example, a Pipeline can generate a process around the Dataflow. For example, you may want to run a Dataflow in a loop until something happens, and with the failure or success of each execution, you want to perform a task such as sending out an email, copying data somewhere, running a stored procedure, etc.

Reza then gets into Dataflows:

Through the years, the Data Transformation engines evolved. In the past, much coding was involved, and the user interface was not the best experience. These days, most actions can be done through pre-built transformations; less coding is needed, and a hardcore developer is not needed for preliminary tasks. This enables citizen data engineers to work with these tools.

Power Query is the data transformation engine of the new generation of Microsoft Data Integration tools and services. Power Query is the data transformation engine used in Power BI. However, Power Query can be used as a standalone cloud-based data transformation service when it is used as Dataflow. Dataflow is the ETL in the cloud offered by Microsoft, which uses the Power Query engine.