Copy Activity in Azure Data Factory (V2) supports creating a destination table automatically

[pflorenzano]

Hello,

I was recently working with a client who was looking to export data from a 3rd party database to Azure SQL Database.  Because of the amount of tables they wanted to export, the option to auto create the tables would be the first and smartest solution for them.

With that said, the option was available via Data Factory so I chose it, but when the job was triggered, the table wasn't automatically created and the pipeline failed.

After conducting further research, I discovered the following four sources only support automatic table creation:

• Azure SQL Database
• Azure SQL Data Warehouse.
• SQL Managed Instance
• SQL Server

So my question is this, how come the option to auto create tables is still 'enabled' for other data sources, even though it doesn't work for only the above sources?

Thank you

[#2]

@pflorenzano 

Great observation. Running into difficulties with the 'auto create tables' option myself as well.

It would make a TON of sense for this feature to either.

1. Detect a simple header column in any incoming data source and use those headers as table columns (Why this is difficult is beyond me, I've rarely seen this be a challenging feature to code on any other software suite that handles incoming data).

2. Automatically hide the option to 'auto create tables' IF the "data source" = "one that data factory doesn't like".

Leaving this option wide open and then throwing an error leaves the end user confused. It doesn't ever indicate that your data source type won't actually allow you to automatically create tables.