Performance tuning Azure SQL when loading with Data Factory

Question

I've been able to successfully import data from blobs into Azure SQL and the performance I'm seeing is approximately 55k rows / minute. For my dataset this takes roughly 8 hours to complete.

I've tried changing the DTU of the database, write batch size to the database, parallel copy (from auto, to 1, 2, 3...). All made no noticeable difference.

I'm looking for suggestions on what I can do to improve the load rate into Azure SQL using Data Factory (v2).

Answer 1

The issue turned out to be the amount of I/O required. Moving to 'Premium' level before doing the bulk load reduced the load time significantly.