Are you confused about What is ETL Tool? Do you want to gain a clear idea about how ETL Tools work and how they come in handy for a business? Well, look no further! This article aims at providing you with an in-depth guide about ETL Tools. It will help you gain knowledge about what is ETL tool, their use cases, types, and why they are a must for any business!
Upon a complete walkthrough of the content, you will have a clear idea about what is ETL tool, how ETL Tools work, their features, and how you can evaluate them before making a choice.
What is ETL?
ETL stands for Extract, Transform and Load. In simple terms, ETL would perform the following steps:
- Data is extracted from one or many sources into a staging area.
- Within the staging area, data is transformed into usable formats by converting data types, combining fields, etc. depending on the business use case.
- Finally, the transformed data is loaded to a destination – often a data warehouse.
Just this definition would not help completely understand what is ETL tool. However, the answer to the next question will.
The Use of an ETL tool
Data is often scattered across different systems and applications. Companies may have client and product information in a CRM, such as Salesforce, the accounting data may be in Quickbooks, legacy data stored in Excel spreadsheets, and the website transactions may be in a database like MySQL.
In order to derive meaningful insights that can grow the business, it would be necessary to bring data from all these disparate data sources together in a useable format, to a single source of truth – a Data Warehouse.
ETL tools have been developed in response to a clear need for methodologies to simplify and enhance the process of getting the raw data scattered across multiple systems into a data analytics warehouse.
To be able to help you understand what is ETL tool, this article will dive into some of the use cases where an ETL tool will be used. The article also gives an overview of the ETL tools available and ends with a checklist of what you need to look for when evaluating an ETL tool. There are various types of ETL tools that are there according to the usage: Ex- Power BI ETL tools.
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What is ETL Tool: Use Cases for ETL Tools
Here is a list of some of the most popular use cases where ETL Tools come in handy:
Building a Data Lake
A Data Lake is a central repository used to store data in its raw format. For instance, some of the key sources of data are unstructured or semi-structured. For example, text messages, web pages, video, other multimedia are all examples of unstructured data.
A data lake is built for a use case where there is no need to define a schema prior to getting the data into a data lake. This means companies can store all the data for future use without having to know what kind of business intelligence questions they may have to answer.
An ETL tool can help bring data from disparate data sources into the data lake in a hassle-free fashion.
Building a Data Warehouse
In today’s world, this has become one of the most common use cases for ETL.
Data Warehouse is a structured environment. Data from the various data sources used by the business will need to be cleaned, enriched, and transformed before it can be loaded to the warehouse. Once in the warehouse, this data becomes a ‘single source of truth’ for the company.
The key step in setting up a data warehouse is to ensure that the data loaded is indeed accurate and up-to-date and will function as the needed ‘single source of truth’. An ETL tool can facilitate the above use case with ease and produce a trustworthy data load.
Setting Up Data Migration
When businesses decide to move from Legacy systems to an updated infrastructure, they rely on an ETL tool to help with the heavy Data Migration involved. This might include extracting the data from source systems, transforming it to a format the new system understands, and loading this to the new infrastructure. Data migrations are often a one-time affair.
The Need for an ETL Tool
Now that you understand what is ETL tool, the next step is to understand – why are they needed?
All the above use cases can be achieved without using an ETL tool as well. Many businesses attempt to build a custom solution to solve this problem. However, there are many reasons that make it hard to be 100% successful at it. Here is why ETL tools prove to be a better alternative.
- Building custom code for ETL is not a straightforward process. However, there are way too many caveats, complexities, and difficulties in monitoring the accuracy and consistency of data. Any misses there can cause irreparable data loss. Plus, considering what is ETL tool and how it speeds existing business processes is always a worthwhile discussion.
- As the business expands, new data sources will come on the radar and will need to be added to the data warehouse. This adds to the engineering workload and would be hard to achieve in an ad-hoc fashion.
- The cost and overhead of resources needed to maintain custom ETL scripts and infrastructure are super high.
A powerful ETL tool streamlines all the ETL processes and minimizes the overhead. A reliable ETL tool will also come with built-in monitoring and alert system which keeps the data infrastructure abreast of any breakdowns or hitches.
All of this combined will give reliable, consistent, and accurate data so that businesses can focus on deriving meaningful insights.
What is ETL Tool: Types of ETL Tools Available in the Market
Our next section after what is ETL tool and their needs is about the different types of ETL tools that are available in the market. The Best ETL tools that are available today can be classified based on two dimensions: Batch Vs Real-time and OnPremise Vs Cloud. Each of these serves a unique purpose. You can learn more about them from the following sections:
Integrate MySQL to Snowflake
Integrate Amazon S3 to Redshift
Batch ETL tools vs Streaming ETL Tools
Having learned about what is ETL tool, their uses, and needs, let’s have a perspective on how batch-time ETL tools compare with real-time ETL tools. A traditional method of getting the data to a destination is to use batch processing. The data will be extracted, transformed, and loaded into the data warehouse in batches of ETL jobs. This is cost-effective as it consumes limited resources in a time-bound manner. Some of the top batch ETL tools are:
Today, the need to collect and analyze the data in the shortest possible time has increased. Whatever be the data source, it needs to be cleaned, enriched, and loaded to the destination in real-time. This is where the need for a real-time data integration tool came into play. Real-time ETL tools help get the most efficient time-to-insight ratio.
The top Real-time ETL tools available are as follows:
On-Premise Vs Cloud ETL Tools
Many businesses run on legacy systems that have both the data and the warehouse set up on-premise. This is mostly implemented from a data security perspective – where the data does not go out of the network of the organization.
In such cases, businesses should consider questions like what is ETL tool and what are their preferred options for having an ETL solution that is compatible to run on-premise. Here are some of the top on-premise ETL tools:
On the other hand, new-age businesses have all their data residing on various applications hosted on the cloud. Given the data now resides on the cloud, businesses are increasingly moving to a cloud data warehouse that allows them to leverage the flexibility and agility that the cloud infrastructure offers.
A cloud ETL tool is built to enable easy data movement from the data sources used by new-age businesses to a cloud destination. Here are some of the top cloud ETL tools:
What is ETL Tool: ETL Use in Various Industries
Data becomes a vital need for any industry as making data-driven decisions rather than relying on guesswork or old data. As the data generation from various devices is increasing, so is the requirement to quickly transfer data from source to Data Warehouse.
Industries came to know about what is ETL Tool and how it can be useful for different industries to get data from multiple sources. This changed the entire way industries used to treat data.
Each industry has a different goal for Data Integration as it unifies data from multiple sources, transforms it, loads it, and then analyzes data to generate useful insights. The insights can help predict sales, optimize a process, improve resource dependencies, enhance customer interaction, and much more. The use of ETL in various industries are listed below:
1) Healthcare
Healthcare is a diverse sector that takes up data from patients’ experiences, new research, and after several tests. It is the most critical industry that needs high accuracy data. ETL Data Integration help create Machine Learning models that are used by many healthcare apps and platforms to help patients know any health issues in advance. ETL tools also help healthcare data to make reports and optimize the clinical workflow.
2) Public Sector
The public sector needs data to optimize the process for any government project. The need for reliable and holistic data to find better deals in a tight budget is essential for the public sector. ETL tools also provide real-time data that helps to know the estimated time to complete a project.
3) Manufacturing
Manufacturing is an industry with many sub-sectors and consists of multiple cycles from raw material to delivering the final product to customers. An ETL Tool can help Manufacturing data to transform and load to the destination where deeper analysis on data can be done.
It can help the industry optimize the supply chain and predict the delays in shipments based on external factors, changes in operating costs of different sectors and bring transparency in the overall process.
4) Financial Service
Financial Institutions require high stream data in their hands to quickly make the most relevant decisions. ETL Data Integration delivers accurate data to financial services to generate regular reports, make dashboards, get real-time updates, and analyze different investment plans.
ETL Tools also helps in transferring financial data to Data Warehouses to further analyze various patterns in data to avoid fraud and enhance the relationship with customers.
Related Reads on ETL Tools:
Factors to Consider While Evaluating an ETL Tool
A strong ETL tool will be an invaluable part of the data analytics stack of a data-driven business. The ETL tool selected should connect to all the data sources used by the company; have a glitch-free work interface, and provide a reliable, accurate, and secure data load.
The following set of questions will help you select an ETL tool:
- What are the different data sources that the tool can bring data from?
- Are there any limits on the scale/volume of data the tool can handle?
- How does the tool handle errors? Does it ensure data consistency and accuracy?
- How smooth and efficient are its data transformation capabilities?
- How easy is the tool to use?
- How smooth is the and how soon can the project see the light of the day?
What is the Future of ETL?
After knowing what is ETL Tool and how it can transform a raw piece of data into a valuable one. It has gone through many changes from using the traditional ETL Tool that is rigid and requires modifications for any change in the data stream. Now automated Data Pipelines ETL Tools such as Hevo can automatically load and transform data from source to Data Warehouse without coding.
Interested in the various ETL tools? Check out our comprehensive guide to see which type suits your requirements best.
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Conclusion
This article introduced you to the concept of ETL and provided you with an in-depth understanding of what is ETL Tool and the data use-cases that you can effortlessly solve using an ETL Tool. It also listed down some of the most popular and different types of ETL Tools available in the market that you can choose from for your business needs.
If you’re looking for an all-in-one solution that will not only help you transfer data but also transform it into analysis-ready form, then Hevo Data is the right choice for you! It will take care of all your ETL and Analytics needs in a completely automated manner, allowing you to focus on key business activities.
FAQ on ETL Tools
What is an ETL tool?
An ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tool is a SaaS software designed to automate extracting data from various sources, transforming it into a usable format, and loading it into a target database or data warehouse.
Why do organizations use ETL tools?
Organizations use ETL tools to streamline data processing, ensure data consistency, and automate data movement from different sources into a central repository. This allows for efficient data analysis, reporting, and decision-making.
Can ETL tools handle large datasets?
Yes, many ETL tools like Hevo Data are designed to handle large volumes of data and can process millions of records efficiently. Some tools are optimized for big data environments and can integrate with technologies like Hadoop or cloud-based data warehouses.
With over a decade of experience, Sarad has been instrumental in designing and developing Hevo's fundamental components. His expertise lies in building lean solutions for various software challenges. Sarad is passionate about mentoring fellow engineers and continually exploring new technologies to stay at the forefront of the industry. His dedication and innovative approach have made significant contributions to Hevo's success.
