Before you dive into understanding what the top ETL solutions in the market today offer, it is important to briefly understand the ETL process itself. This will set you up better to appreciate the value provided by different ETL tools.
What is ETL?
ETL simply stands for – Extract, Transform, and Load. It is the process of moving raw data from one or more sources into a destination data warehouse in a more useful form. This is an essential process in making the data analysis-ready in order to have a seamless business intelligence system in place.
Often, the process entails the following: Data is first extracted from the source and maintained in a staging area. While in the staging area, depending on the use case of your business, the data is transformed into a format that’s more useful for analysis and more appropriate for the destination warehouse schema. It is then loaded into the destination data warehouse.
What are ETL Tools?
ETL tools are applications/platforms that enable users to execute ETL processes. In simple terms, these tools help businesses move data from one or many disparate data sources to a destination. These help in making the data both comprehensible and accessible (and in turn analysis-ready) in the desired location – often a data warehouse. You can read more about an ETL tool here.
Selecting an ETL tool is a make or break decision for companies because if not done carefully, this can become a cost that . Good ETL tools automate most of these workflows without needing human intervention at all and provide a highly available service.
Now that we know what an ETL tool is, let us look at the list of top ETL tools and go through a quick comparison of these.
11 Best ETL Tools List
- Informatica PowerCenter
- IBM InfoSphere DataStage
- Hevo Data
- Talend
- Pentaho
- AWS Glue
- StreamSets
- Blendo
- Google Data flow
- Azure Data Factory
- Apache Nifi
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