04/05/2016 Update: If you are looking to use the latest version of the Azure Data Lake Store SDK (Microsoft.Azure.Management.DataLake.Store 0.10.1-preview) please see my post Upgrading to Microsoft.Azure.Management.DataLake.Store 0.10.1-preview to Access Azure Data Lake Store Using C# for what needs to be done to update the DataLakeHelper class.
Introduction
When working with Azure Data Factory (ADF), having the ability to take advantage of Custom .Net Activities greatly expands the ADF use case. One particular example where a Custom .Net Activity is necessary would be when you need to pull data from an API on a regular basis. For example you may want to pull sales leads from the Salesforce API on a daily basis or possibly some search query against the Twitter API every hour. Instead of having a console application scheduled on some VM or local machine, this can be accomplished with ADF and a Custom .Net Activity.
With the data extraction portion complete the next question is where would the raw data land for continued processing? Azure Data Lake Store of course! Utilizing the Azure Data Lake Store (ADLS) SDK, we can land the raw data into ADLS allowing for continued processing down the pipeline. This post will focus on an end to end solution doing just that, using Azure Data Factory and a Custom .Net Activity to pull data from the Salesforce API then landing it into ADLS for further processing. The end to end solution will run inside a Custom .Net Activity but the steps here to connect to ADLS from .net are universal and can be used for any .net application.
Prerequisites
- You will need an Azure Subscription. Free Trial
- Visual Studio. Visual Studio Community 2015
- (ADLS)Azure Data Lake Store
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