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4.1.1. Data Ingestion with Azure Data Factory
💡 First Principle: Data Factory is an orchestration service—it moves and transforms data but doesn't store or analyze it. Think of it as the data pipeline builder.
ETL vs. ELT (Critical Concept!)
| Approach | Process | When to Use |
|---|---|---|
| ETL | Extract → Transform → Load | Traditional; transform before loading |
| ELT | Extract → Load → Transform | Modern; load raw data first, transform with cloud compute |
Modern preference: ELT. Load raw data into cheap storage (Data Lake), then use powerful cloud compute (Synapse, Databricks) to transform. Storage is cheap; compute is flexible.