The unit of work inside a Lakeflow pipeline that takes data from a source, transforms it and lands it in a destination like a streaming table. Streaming flows either append or update, and CREATE FLOW lets you declare a flow apart from the table it feeds.
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In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains Flow in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- Pipeline
Groups activities logically so that, together, they move and transform data, either one after another or side by side; found in both Azure Data Factory and Microsoft Fabric.
- LIKE
Compares strings with a pattern that can contain the % and _ wildcards. Because it only understands character patterns, searching big volumes of text this way is much slower than using full-text search.
- Streaming table
Delta table built for incremental loading, declared with
CREATE STREAMING TABLE(Databricks SQL or Lakeflow pipelines). Wrapping sources inSTREAM, as inSTREAM read_files(...), reads them as streams. - Streaming
Sending model output piece by piece as server-sent events. Only the delivery changes; the answer's content, completeness and cost stay the same.
- Append
Policy effect in Azure that inserts fields only while a resource is being created or updated; resources that already exist are not corrected by it.
- CRUD
Shorthand for create, read, update and delete, the four basic things you do with data. Data-plane roles in Azure Cosmos DB, for instance, authorise those operations on items.
- Event
Table in Log Analytics where entries from Windows event logs are kept.
Related terms
- 5-tuple
The five values that identify a flow: protocol plus the source and destination IP addresses and ports. Azure Load Balancer hashes them by default to spread traffic, and IP flow verify in Network Watcher takes them as its input.
- Activator
Rather than just displaying data as a dashboard does, this Real-Time Intelligence tool in Microsoft Fabric reacts to it. You define rules without writing code, and once a pattern or condition is spotted it can send an email or Teams message, or start a Power Automate flow or Fabric pipeline.
- AzureNetworkAnalytics_CL
Table in Log Analytics populated by Traffic Analytics with processed NSG flow log results; each field name ends with a type suffix, for example
FlowType_s,SubType_sorFlowStartTime_t. - Catalog
The first level of Unity Catalog's
catalog.schema.tablenaming and the primary boundary for isolating data. Privileges granted on a catalog flow down to every schema and object it contains. - CFD
An Azure Boards chart showing how many work items sit in each state over time, revealing flow, work in progress and bottlenecks. It can't give precise lead or cycle times; separate widgets do that.
- Client credentials
App-only OAuth 2.0 flow in which the application signs in as itself, not on behalf of a user; daemons, service-to-service calls and managed identities rely on it.
- Cross-filter direction
Controls whether filters flow one way or both ways along a relationship. Two-way filtering can slow queries and make filter paths ambiguous, and row-level security ignores it unless Apply security filter in both directions is ticked.
- Definition version
Lets an initiative or assignment lock to a specific release of a policy definition. If none is chosen, the newest major release is used and minor updates flow in automatically.