Azure Data Factory is an ETL and orchestrator tool for building cloud-native data engineering pipelines. It has a lot of source connectors available, and this list is overgrowing. There are numerous activities available to manipulate and work with your data. This article describes how to activate and deactivate activity in Azure Data Factory.
Background
When working with ETL or orchestration tools, it is crucial to have the ability to enable or disable tasks or activities within a pipeline for various reasons. Firstly, it allows one to disable specific activities while debugging the code temporarily. Secondly, it enables running only a portion of the code to accomplish specific tasks.
Microsoft recently announced that they are adding a feature to enable and disable activity in Azure Data Factory. This feature is in the preview currently.
How to disable activity in ADF?
1. Open Azure data factory studio and navigate to the pipeline.
2. Select the activity which you want to disable, and under the general property window, set the Activity state radio button to inactive, as shown in the image below.
You can also deactivate the activity with a right click on the activity and click on Deactivate (preview) as shown in the below image. Make sure to save the changes to take them into effect.
If you wish to run this pipeline using a trigger, you would need to publish changes.
Pro tips:
1. While the activity state will help enable or disable activity in ADF, it seems to lack a feature to programmatically or conditionally enable or disable it.
2. Know how to connect to Azure SQL Database from Azure Data Factory using the managed identity.
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Pavan Bangad
9+ years of experience in building data warehouse and big data application.
Helping customers in their digital transformation journey in cloud.
Passionate about data engineering.