Table is required for Copy Activity

Summary

I’ve seen a lot of people manually create tables in Azure SQL when doing a data migration from a source system to SQL DB as the Sink. For those that don’t know, there is actually an option to automatically create a table during runtime.

If you use the Copy Activity, when validating you might get this error:

This error occurs because you need to set the table option in the Sink.

Here I have edited the connection details and specified a table name called dbo.datatable

Now on validation, I do not get any error.

Final thoughts

The documentation isn’t great. It leads you to believe that tables will be automatically created without table names being specified.