AZ-305 Question 103
Single answerA retail company needs to collect and transform product, sales, and customer data from multiple on-premises and cloud-based sources. They want to schedule and automate data workflows, perform transformations with minimal code, and store the unified data in Azure Data Lake Storage. Which Azure service would best meet these data integration and transformation requirements?
- A
Use Azure Data Factory with Mapping Data Flows to ingest and transform data before loading it into Azure Data Lake Storage
- B
Use Azure Blob Storage with PowerShell scripts to upload and manually transform data
- C
Use Azure Analysis Services to directly ingest and model data from all sources
- D
Use Azure Event Hubs for all ingestion and real-time transformation
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A
Explanation
Azure Data Factory is the recommended service for data integration and ETL/ELT in Azure, offering robust capabilities to ingest data from on-premises and cloud systems, perform transformations using Mapping Data Flows, and schedule workflows. For more information, see Microsoft documentation on Azure Data Factory: https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/data-factory/
- A. Correct.
Option 1 is correct. Azure Data Factory provides a comprehensive solution for orchestrating data pipelines, executing transformations with Mapping Data Flows, and scheduling workflows. It allows you to ingest data from multiple sources with minimal coding and apply transformations before storing the data in Azure Data Lake.
- B. Incorrect.
Option 2 is incorrect. While you can store data in Azure Blob Storage and automate scripts, this approach is more manual and lacks the robust orchestration and transformation capabilities of a dedicated service like Azure Data Factory. It also requires more maintenance for scheduling and error handling.
- C. Incorrect.
Option 3 is incorrect. Azure Analysis Services is primarily used for semantic modeling and creating analytical models rather than orchestrating data ingestion and transformation. It doesn’t natively handle ETL/ELT workloads the way Azure Data Factory does.
- D. Incorrect.
Option 4 is incorrect. Azure Event Hubs is a highly scalable event ingestor designed for streaming scenarios. It doesn’t provide built-in data transformation or orchestration features and is generally used for large-scale event collection rather than structured data transformation.