But it gets the job done, and reliably so. In the cloud, meanwhile, Microsoft's first release of Azure Data Factory (ADF) was, to put it charitably, a minimal viable product (MVP) release.

Another new Microsoft Azure service now in preview is aimed at helping developers integrate and get insights from their disparate data sources more easily.

In “ Designing a metadata-driven ETL framework with Azure ADF: An architectural perspective,” I laid the groundwork for a scalable, metadata-driven ETL framework using Azure Data Factory (ADF).