I need to upload WEB API response files into Azure Data Lake.
Then I have to dump those files into Azure SQL tables.
Above both processes must be scheduled to execute on hourly basis.
Should I use Azure Web Jobs or Azure Function.
Azure Data Factory is probably the better mechanism to drive this recurring hourly pipeline. More details here.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-factory/data-factory-scheduling-and-execution
If you are running Azure Functions on Consumption plan, the function call must complete within 5 minutes, which might be not enough for big data sets.
For the rest Functions and Web Jobs are similar for your scenario. Functions are actually running on top of Web Jobs. And if you don't need any advanced features of Functions (e.g. bindings), I would go for a Job.
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We've designed a Data Architecture for our client on Azure wherein, We ingest the sources into a Raw Layer consisting of a Azure SQL Database. This Azure SQL Database acts as a Source Mirror and Has Near Real time sync enabled.
We also have an ODS Layer which is populated from the Previously mentioned Azure SQL Database (Source Mirror) as per the given Data Model. This Layer should ideally take anywhere between 30mins and 1 Hour to Load.
May I Know How Do I Handle the Concurrent Writes and Reads from the Raw Layer (Azure SQL Database, Source Mirror) ? It Syncs every 5 mins with the Sources but also read every 30mins - 1 Hour for ODS Layer.
I've to Use Azure Data Factory to Implement my Data Loads
Yes, Azure Data Factory platform is best fit for such scenarios. Its a cloud-based ETL and data integration tool that lets you build data-driven processes for managing data transportation and data transformation at scale. You can use Azure Data Factory to design and plan data-driven processes (also known as pipelines) that may consume data from a variety of sources. With data flows or computing services like Azure HDInsight Hadoop, Azure Databricks, and Azure SQL Database, you can design sophisticated ETL processes that convert data graphically.
When using control flow, you can use a GetMetadata activity to get a
list of files in a storage account, then pass that list to a for each
activity with the Sequential flag set to false to process all files
concurrently (in parallel) up to the maximum batch size according to
the activities defined in the for each loop.
Here, is the Microsoft Official Document for the Azure Datafactory Connectors Overview | Docs
I currently have pipelines developed that leverage Azure Data Factory for orchestration and Azure DataBricks for it's compute to perform the following actions... I receive tens of thousands of single record json files into Azure Blob in a real-time basis and on a 15 minute basis i check the folders for any new files and once found I load them into a dataframe using Databricks and load these into a single file in SQL DB before having other ADF jobs trigger stored procedures which then transform my data into final SQL tables.... We are looking to move away from Databricks as we are not using it for it's true capabilities but are of course paying the Databricks costs. Looking for ideas on other solutions to load tens of thousands of jsons into SQL DB (with minimal to no transformations) on a periodic (i.e. 15 minute) basis. We are a microsoft shop so not looking to necessarily move away from Azure tools.
Here a few ideas:
use Azure Functions + Blob Trigger / Event Grid to process the JSON files in real time (every time a new JSON file arrives, it will trigger your function). Then you could either insert into the final table or on a temporary table.
another idea would be combine Azure Functions + Blob Trigger / Event Grid to sink the data to a data lake. You can use ADF to sink it to SQL final tables.
Azure SQL DB is actually pretty capable as far as JSON goes so you could just use OPENROWSET to import the data directly from blob store and OPENJSON to shred it. You could then use a Logic App running on a schedule to call the proc say every 15 minutes, you wouldn't even need ADF as part of the solution.
I've worked up a couple of similar answers previously, eg here and here, but let me know if you want to progress more down this route and we can work up something more detailed.
I need to run a job at regular 5 min interval where the we will call a web service to get data then transform the data and update the database.
For such scenario should is it best to use azure functions or azure durable functions.
I have several external data APIs that I access using some Python scripts. My scripts run from an on-premises server, transform the data, and store it in a SQL Server database on the same server. I suppose it's a rudimentary ETL system run with Python and T-SQL.
The system is about to grow quite a bit with new APIs and will require more complex data pipelines (for example, some of the API data will be spun off to more than one table). I think this would be a good time to move the system onto Azure (we are heavily integrated with Microsoft so it will have to be Azure!).
I have spent a few days researching the Azure products that would let me run Python scripts to access data from web APIs and store the processed data in a cloud database. I'm looking for advice on what sort of Azure products other people have used for similar jobs. At the moment it seems I will need:
Azure SQL Database to hold the processed data that can be accessed by various colleagues.
Azure Data Factory to manage, log, and schedule the pipeline jobs and to run my custom Python scripts (is this even possible?).
Azure Batch to run the aforementioned Python scripts but I'm not sure about this.
I want to put together a proposal basically and start thinking about costs but it would be good to hear from someone who has done something similar - am I on the right track or completely off? Should I just stay on-premises? Thank you in advance.
Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Data Warehouse are good for relational data. And if you want to use NoSQL, you could go with Azure Cosmos DB. If you want to use Files to store data, you could use Azure Data Lake.
For python scripts, you could use custom activity or Data bricks for Azure Data Factory.
Azure SQL Warehouse should be used if the amount of data you want to load is in petabytes. Also, Azure Data warehouse is not meant for complex transformations. I would recommend it for plain data load with PolyBase.
Consider a data processing pipeline as follows:
Fetch a large amount of data from a REST API that's hosted somewhere on the internet and persist it to a data store.
Perform some complex data transformations on the persisted data.
Persist the results of the data transformations on a data store.
Aiming to implement such a pipeline in Azure, steps 2 and 3 seem like a good fit for implementation as Azure Data Factory activities.
My questions is - Does it make sense to implement step 1 in an Azure Data Factory activity as well?
Technically it might be possible to code a .Net activity that perform the data download and persistence.
No - do not implement step 1 in an Azure Data Factory activity.
Technically it is possible to run the entire process from ADF but I would argue that the choice is more costly (relatively) than other options available to you because you will pay for each activity in Azure Data Factory.
For instance, what if the rest api does not have any new data to offer when you initiate the (scheduled) activity? You'll pay for that.
You might consider the following as an easy to implement alternative:
1 - Create a .NET console app, publish as a WebJob, schedule to run daily.
2 - The long-running console app can query the rest api, persist data into azure storage / documentdb, push a message into queue which triggers ADF steps 2/3 to run against the saved data.
I have done exactly that using .Net Activity. I had a need to fetch data from Salesforce api. This has been working well for my needs. Here is a post I wrote up about creating a .net activity and storing the data in azure data lake.
As in Newport99's answer yes you will incur costs for that activity but I am not sure how cost effect it would be to be running a separate web app to host a web job and also run the Azure Data Factory pipeline. When I was originally designing a solution the WebJob was my first choice but in the end I prefer to have the whole solution utilizing one azure service instead of multiple.
Hope that helps.
There have been a lot of improvements to ADF in the years since this question was posted, including a REST connector.
Here's the approach recommended by ADF at this time...
Copy data from a REST endpoint by using Azure Data Factory