Using the copy activity

You can create pipelines and activities from two different places. The first is Azure Data Factory itself. The second place is Azure Synapse Analytics. The "integrate" part of Synapse Analytics is actually the same as Azure Data Factory. ETL is such an integral part of analytical databases that Microsoft brings everything involved in developing analytical databases into a single environment. We have the serverless SQL pool and the Spark pool to perform advanced transformations on data when necessary. And we have pipelines with all the different sorts of activities to create the entire workflow. Because this book is about databases and not ETL by itself, we will work from Synapse Analytics.

We will first copy a single table. We will then move on to copy all tables.

Copying a single table to the data lake

We will begin by copying the customer table from the Northwind database into the data lake created in Chapter 10, Designing and Implementing...