OK, enough talk, let's get our hands dirty. In this chapter, we will cover the basics of the data factory and show you what the components discussed in the previous chapter are doing.

Here is what's needed for this chapter, as well as all others in this book:

• An active Azure subscription: if you don't have one, you can use a trial version at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/free/.
• Once we have an Azure subscription, we will create the following Azure components:
  • A resource group that will group everything we're going to create together
  • An ADF with a copy activity
  • An Azure Blob storage
  • A SQL Azure database