If you're new to Azure Data Factory (ADF), pipelines can initially feel complicated. You may see triggers, linked services, datasets, integration runtimes, copy activities, staging tables, transformations, Airflow, dbt, and several other components working together.

The easiest way to understand ADF is to stop thinking of it as just a tool that "moves data" and instead think of it as part of a data journey.

A typical enterprise data flow might look like this:

Source System

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