What is ETL (Extract, Transform, Load)?
ETL stands for extract, transform, and load. It is a data integration process that integrates data from several sources into a single, consistent data store loaded into a data warehouse or other target system.
As databases gained rising prominence during the 1970s, ETL emerged as a method to integrate and load data, streamlining computational processes and enabling in-depth analysis. Over time, it evolved into the predominant method for processing data in data warehousing projects.
ETL forms the basis for data analytics and machine learning workflows. By applying business rules, ETL tools effectively cleanse and organize data to meet specific business intelligence requirements, such as monthly reporting. Additionally, it can handle more complex analytics, improving back-end processes and user experiences. A company commonly uses ETL to:
- Extract data from legacy systems.
- Cleanse the data to enhance data quality and build consistency.
- Load data into a target database.
How ETL Functions
The ETL process comprises three steps that enable data integration from source to destination: extraction, transformation, and loading.
1. Extraction
Many companies manage data from multiple sources and use several data analysis tools to produce business intelligence. To execute a complex data strategy like this, the data should be able to travel freely between systems and apps. Before moving data to a new destination, it should be extracted from sources like a data lake or data warehouse. Structured and unstructured data are imported and integrated into a single repository. Ample amounts of data are extracted from several multiple data sources such as:
- Existing databases and legacy systems
- Hybrid, on-prem, and cloud environments
- Sales and marketing applications
- Mobile devices and apps
- CRM systems
- Data storage platforms
- Data warehouses
- Analytics tools
The first step of the ETL process helps to automate the extraction process and create more reliable and efficient workstreams.
2. Transformation
During this stage, rules and regulations are applied which ensure data quality and accessibility. To meet your organizational reporting needs, you can also apply rules. The data transformation process further includes the following sub-processes:
- Cleansing: missing values and inconsistencies in the data are resolved.
- Standardization: Formatting rules are used and applied to the dataset.
- Deduplication: Redundant data is discarded and excluded.
- Verification: Anomalies are flagged, and unusable data is removed.
- Sorting: Data is arranged as per the type of requirement.
- Other tasks: Any optional or additional rules can be used to enhance data quality.
Transformation is commonly regarded as the most significant aspect of the ETL process. The data transformation step helps to enhance data integrity- removing redundant data and ensuring that raw data reaches its new destination fully compatible and ready to use.
3. Loading
The final phase of the ETL process involves loading the transformed data into a fresh destination, which could be a data lake or a data warehouse. There are two approaches for this: full loading and incremental loading.
- Full loading: In an ETL full loading scenario, all the data from the transformation process is loaded into the data warehouse or repository as new and distinct records. While this can be beneficial for research purposes, it results in datasets that grow exponentially and can become challenging to maintain over time.
- Incremental loading: An alternative, more manageable approach is incremental loading. With incremental loading, incoming data is compared to the existing data, and only new and unique information is added as additional records. This architecture allows smaller, more cost-effective data warehouses to handle and handle business intelligence efficiently.
Insight into ETL tools
ETL tools automate the extraction, transformation, and loading mechanism. Integrating data from several data sources or databases. These ETL tools comprise data profiling, metadata writing, and data cleansing abilities. A tool must be easy-to-use, secure, maintain, and compatible with a company’s data solutions.
Previously, companies used to write their own ETL code. There are several open-source and commercial ETL tools and cloud services. Typical competencies of these products include the following:
- Detailed automation and ease of use: Most ETL tools automate the whole data flow, from data sources to the target data warehouse. Several tools suggest rules for data extraction, transformation, and loading.
- A visual, drag-and-drop interface: This feature determines rules and data flows.
- Support for complex data management: It involves assistance through complex calculations, string manipulations, and data integrations.
- Security and compliance: The most suitable ETL tools encrypt data at rest and in motion. These are certified and compliant with government and industry regulations such as GDPR and HIPAA.
Additionally, several ETL tools have emerged to include ETL capability and to help consolidate real-time and streaming data for artificial intelligence (AI) applications.
Why is ETL Significant?
Today, organizations have both structured and unstructured data from several sources, such as:
- User data from customer relationship management (CRM) systems and online payment.
- Operations and inventory data from vendor units.
- Sensor data from Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
- Marketing data from customer feedback and social media.
- Employee data from the internal human resources system.
Through the implementation of the extract, transform, and load (ETL) process, individual raw datasets can be transformed into a format and structure that is better suited for analytics, leading to more valuable insights. This enables various applications, such as online retailers analyzing point-of-sale data to predict demand and optimize inventory management or marketing teams to combine CRM data with customer feedback on social media to gain insights into consumer behavior.
How Does ETL Process Benefit Business Intelligence?
The ETL process enhances business intelligence and analytics by making the mechanism more accurate, efficient, reliable, and detailed.
- Historical context: ETL offers deep historical context to the company’s data. A company often combines outdated data with data from new systems and applications. You can view outdated datasets along with recent data that provides a long-term view of data.
- Consolidated data view: ETL enables the creation of a unified perspective on data enabling comprehensive analysis and reporting. Handling multiple datasets involves time-consuming coordination and can lead to inefficiencies and delays. However, ETL consolidates databases and diverse data sources into a unified view. This integration process enhances data quality and saves time for data movement, categorization, and standardization. As a result, it becomes easier to analyze, visualize, and derive meaningful insights from large datasets.
- Precise data analysis: ETL offers more accurate data analysis to adhere to regulatory and compliance standards. You can consolidate ETL tools with data quality tools to clean, audit, and profile data, ensuring the data is trustworthy.
- Task automation: ETL streamlines repetitive data processing tasks to enable efficient analysis. ETL tools automate the data migration process, allowing for the configuration of periodic or real-time integration of data changes. This empowers data engineers to allocate more time towards innovation and reduces the need for managing tedious tasks such as data movement and formatting.
ETL and Other Data Integration Methods
ETL is a leading data integration method. However, several other techniques help to facilitate data integration workstreams. These include:
- Change data capture (CDC): It discovers and captures only the source data that has changed and shifts that data to the target unit. CDC is often utilized to reduce the resources needed during the ETL “extract” step. It can be used independently to shift data into a data lake and another repository in real-time.
- Data replication: It copies reforms in data sources in batches or in real-time to a central database. The process is often listed as a data integration technique. It is mainly used to create backups for disaster recovery.
- Data visualization: It leverages a software abstraction layer to establish a unified and integrated view of data without physically copying, transforming, or loading the source data into a target system. Organizations can use data visualization to create virtual data warehouses, data lakes, and data marts from the same source data, eliminating the need for separate platforms and reducing complexity and costs. While data virtualization can work in conjunction with ETL, it is increasingly viewed as an alternative to ETL and other physical data integration methods.
- Stream data integration (SDI): It operates in real-time by continuously ingesting data streams, transforming them, and loading them into a target system for analysis. The critical aspect of SDI is its continuous nature. Instead of integrating snapshots of data extracted from sources at specific times, SDI integrates data as it becomes available, ensuring a constant flow. SDI enables the creation of a data store that powers analytics, machine learning, and real-time applications, contributing to improvements in areas such as customer experience and fraud detection.
Drawbacks with ETL
While ETL is significant, with this exponential increase in data sources and their types, building and maintaining reliable data pipelines have emerged as one of the most challenging aspects of data engineering.
From the start, building pipelines ensuring data reliability is a slow and arduous process. Data pipelines involve intricate code with limited reusability. A pipeline built in one environment cannot be used in another, even if the underlying code is similar. Consequently, data engineers often become the bottleneck, constantly reinventing the wheel.
In addition to pipeline development, managing data quality within increasingly complex pipeline architectures poses difficulties. Faulty data can easily flow through a pipeline undetected, compromising the integrity of the entire dataset. To maintain quality and guarantee reliable insights, data engineers must write extensive custom code to implement quality checks and validations at every pipeline stage.
Furthermore, companies face mounting operational burdens as pipelines expand in size and complexity, making data reliability exceedingly challenging to maintain. Setting up, scaling, restarting, patching, and updating data processing infrastructure incurs additional time and costs. Identifying and resolving pipeline failures has become daunting due to a lack of visibility and adequate tooling.
Despite these numerous challenges, reliable ETL remains a critical process for businesses aiming to be insight-driven. Without ETL tools that ensure data reliability, teams are forced to make decisions without trustworthy metrics or reports. To scale effectively, data engineers require streamlined and democratized ETL tools that simplify the ETL lifecycle, empowering data teams to construct and leverage their data pipelines for faster insight access.
Final Word
Overall, ETL plays a crucial role in data integration and preparation for analysis. It enables data engineers and analysts to work with consistent and reliable data, facilitating reporting, business intelligence, data mining, and machine learning tasks. By automating the extraction, transformation, and loading processes, the ETL process saves time, improves data quality, and enhances the efficiency of data-driven workflows.
