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The most useful guides in this topic, not just the most recent.
Azure Data Factory Guides & Tutorials
Azure Data Factory end to end — pipelines, linked services, triggers, copy activity, mapping data flows and Synapse.
Azure Data Factory articles
ADF Control Flow: ForEach, If and Until Activities
Control flow activities turn a list of steps into logic. This guide covers the four that do most of the work in Azure Data Factory: ForEach for loops, If Condition and Switch for branching, and Until for polling, with each one's properties and documented limits, a JSON example, the nesting rule and concurrency traps.
Copying Data from On-Prem SQL to Azure with ADF
Azure Data Factory cannot reach a database behind your firewall, so a self-hosted integration runtime inside the network does the work. This guide covers how that flow operates, what the machine and firewall need, the linked service and Copy activity definitions, credentials, large tables and the usual failures.
Tumbling Window Triggers: Backfills and Dependencies
A tumbling window trigger runs a pipeline once for each fixed, contiguous slice of time, and remembers which slices it has done. This guide explains the window model, a worked backfill of 31 daily windows, concurrency, delay and retry, dependencies between triggers, and passing window boundaries to a pipeline.
Slowly Changing Dimensions in ADF Data Flows
A slowly changing dimension keeps history when an attribute such as a customer's city changes. This guide builds the Type 2 load as an Azure Data Factory data flow, stream by stream, reproduces it on real data over four loads, and covers surrogate keys, sink order, deletes and safe reruns.
Incremental Data Loading in Azure Data Factory
Incremental loading copies only what changed since the last run. This guide explains the four approaches Azure Data Factory documents, builds the watermark pattern step by step, runs it on a real table to show what it catches and what it silently misses, and says when to use change tracking, dated folders or windows.
Azure Data Engineer Certification (DP-203) Guide
Exam DP-203 and the Azure Data Engineer Associate certification were retired on 31 March 2025. This guide explains what that means for people who hold it or were studying for it, what the exam covered, how the Fabric Data Engineer Associate exam DP-700 differs, and how to plan your preparation now.