Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert AZ-305 Practice Question

Azure Data Factory is Microsoft's fully managed data integration service. It provides more than 90 native connectors covering on-premises sources such as Oracle and SAP, and SaaS sources like Salesforce. Using a self-hosted integration runtime, it can securely pull data from on-premises systems into Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2. Data Factory's Mapping Data Flows offer a fully visual, code-free environment for complex data transformations that can write the results directly to an Azure Synapse Analytics dedicated SQL pool. Pipelines can be authored visually or as JSON, scheduled with triggers, and monitored from the built-in monitoring hub, all without managing underlying infrastructure.

Azure Logic Apps focuses on event-driven application and workflow integration rather than large-scale data movement and transformation. Azure Databricks provides powerful analytics and transformation but requires Spark knowledge and cluster management, and it lacks the breadth of ready-made connectors and low-code orchestration features. Azure Event Grid is used for event routing, not end-to-end data integration pipelines.