ADF activity policy
In this post, we’ll explore the Azure Data Factory (ADF) activity policy, it’s configuration and default behaviour implications.
Activity policy
This is a configurable property of an ADF execution activity that affects the runtime behaviour of the activity. Such activities include lookups and stored procedure activities.
An example of this can be found in the following code snippet, with the sample text attached at the end of this article in the resources section.
Defaults
It may (or may not) be a surprise to learn that that at the time of this article (Oct 2020), the policy property is not required. If it is not specified, default values are used.
Personally, I’d appreciate shorter timeout and more secure values by default. I suspect when building ADF pipelines, the focus on orchestrating activities can make it very easy to blindly accept these default values.
Policy behaviour
The following table summarises policy behaviours and their default values. This has been captured from this Microsoft page on Activity policy.
Final thoughts
Knowing what these defaults are and their implications, is strangely something I see all too often being ignored until problems emerge later on. I’d encourage developers using ADF to be mindful of these defaults, as a long running pipeline or exposed sensitive data could have disastrous consequences for your business.