I'm thinking of using Data Factory in order to copy data from a Blob Storage container to an SQL table but I'm not quite sure I understand how the pricing works, specifically how the activities are counted.
So if I have a pipeline with 3 activities that copies the data from a CSV with 1000 lines will the total activity count be 3*1 or 3*1000? In other words, will I be charged based on the number o files it processes or the total number of lines it copies?
That's 3 activity runs. Activity runs are measured by the thousand, at $1 per. Since these are Copy activities, they consume Data Integration Units (DIU) at $.25 per hour. Pipeline execution time is billed at $.005 per hour. If you add all this up for 1 pipeline with 3 Copy activities that runs for 1 hour, your total bill is like 27 cents.
We run THOUSANDS of pipelines a month, all with many activities including quite a few Copy activities. Our Data Factory billing is still so low that it looks like a rounding error in our total Azure spend.
The exception to this is Data Flow. Data Flow is a Spark wrapper, so you have to pay for Cluster time, which can get expensive quickly if you aren't careful.
Actually, you have to pay for 2 important metrics: Orchestration and Execution. Please refer to more details from this document.
1.Orchestration, $1 per 1,000 runs. You have 3 activities, then it should be $ 3/1000.
2.Execution, it depends on the DIU you configured,which means the performance of your transmission.
