How does Copy Activity in Azure Data Factory work behind the scenes?

Question

I have a scenario where ADF is used to connect to an on-premise Oracle database through the Self-Hosted Integration Runtime and copy data into Gen 2 storage.

I am wondering what happens behind the scenes in this scenario. Does COPY activity use SQL / Procs to move data?

Answer 1

as described in Microsoft docs: The Copy activity is executed on an integration runtime. You can use different types of integration runtimes for different data copy scenarios:

When you're copying data between two data stores that are publicly accessible through the internet from any IP, you can use the Azure integration runtime for the copy activity. This integration runtime is secure, reliable, scalable, and globally available. When you're copying data to and from data stores that are located on-premises or in a network with access control (for example, an Azure virtual network), you need to set up a self-hosted integration runtime. An integration runtime needs to be associated with each source and sink data store. For information about how the Copy activity determines which integration runtime to use, see Determining which IR to use. To copy data from a source to a sink, the service that runs the Copy activity performs these steps:

1. Reads data from a source data store.
2. Performs serialization/deserialization, compression/decompression, column mapping, and so on. It performs these operations based on the configuration of the input dataset, output dataset, and Copy activity.
3. Writes data to the sink/destination data store.

check this link : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-factory/copy-activity-overview