PASSMN Meeting 2025-10-21 (Virtual Meeting Only)

Important Note: This meeting is online only and will not be held at the Microsoft Technology Center

A big thank you to all who attended MN SQL Saturday last month making it a huge success and our sponsors for their continued support.

Agenda:
📅 Tuesday, October 21, 2025 📅
🕜 3:30-4:00 Kickoff / Announcements
🕜 4:00-5:00 Azure Data Factory (ADF) - Your New SSIS (Jeff Taylor)
🕜 5:00-5:10 Break
🕜 5:10-6:10 Virtual networking and discussion.
🕜 6:10-6:15 Closing

Sessions

🕜 4:00 pm
⭐️ Azure Data Factory (ADF) - Your New SSIS
🙂 Jeff Taylor
As data volumes grow, so does the complexity of managing them. With every increase in data, there's more to extract, transform, and load. This often requires connectors for both extraction and import, yet legacy tools like SSIS may fall short, lacking the modern connectivity and scalability that today’s data demands.
Azure Data Factory (ADF) offers a powerful, cloud-native alternative. With over 120 built-in connectors, ADF enables seamless data integration from virtually any source, while scaling effortlessly to handle large datasets.
In this session, we’ll explore how ADF modernizes ETL/ELT workflows, replacing SSIS with a flexible and scalable platform. We’ll dive into its core components—pipelines, activities, datasets, linked services, data flows, and integration runtimes—and discuss best practices for deployment, monitoring, scheduling, and cost optimization.
To bring it all together, we’ll walk through a live demo of a real-world pipeline originally built for SQL Saturday Jacksonville, showcasing how ADF can tackle practical data integration challenges with minimal coding.

A live demo and walkthrough of a real-world pipeline—originally designed for SQL Saturday Jacksonville—will illustrate how ADF can be used to solve practical data integration challenges with minimal code.

Prerequisites
Participants should have:

• A basic understanding of ETL/ELT concepts.

• Familiarity with SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) or other data integration tools.

• General knowledge of Azure services and cloud-based data workflows.

• Some experience with SQL and data pipelines is helpful but not required.

Session Goals
By the end of this session, attendees will:

• Understand the core components of Azure Data Factory (ADF), including pipelines, activities, datasets, linked services, and data flows.
• Learn how ADF compares to and improves upon SSIS in a cloud-native environment.
• Gain insight into best practices for deployment, monitoring, scheduling, and cost management in ADF.
• See a real-world ADF pipeline in action through a live demo, originally built for SQL Saturday Jacksonville.
• Leave with practical knowledge to start building or migrating data integration solutions using ADF.

🕜 5:10 pm
⭐️ Virtual Networking and Discussion

Speakers

🙂 Speaker 1
⚡️ Azure Data Factory (ADF) - Your New SSIS
Jeff Taylor is a Principal Data Consultant, Microsoft Data Platform MVP, Redgate Community Ambassador, and Octopus Insider with over 27 years of experience specializing in performance tuning and critical data issues. He currently organizes the Jax Data and SQL Saturday Jacksonville and is the Jacksonville Development Users Group co-organizer.