ETL
What is ETL?
ETL stands for "Extract, Transform, and Load."
If you have data from multiple sources that you want to bring into a centralized database, you need to:
Extract
the data from its original source, whether that is another database or an application
Transform
data by cleaning it up, deduplicating it, combining it, and otherwise getting ready to…
Load
the data into the target database or platform
Typically, one ETL tool does all three of these steps, and is a critical part of ensuring that data required for reporting, analytics, and, now, machine learning and artificial intelligence is complete and usable. But the nature of ETL, the data it handles, and where the process takes place has evolved tremendously over the last decade–and the right ETL software is more critical than ever.