ETL software allows companies to consolidate data from different sources, even if it’s in different shapes or formats. It can also cleanse and transform data, eliminating duplicates and making it easier to store. ETL is offered by companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM.
Think of it as a housecleaning for your data. ETL stands for Extract, Transform, and Load. ETL is software that allows companies to consolidate their disparate data by moving it from one place to another, and it doesn’t matter that the data is in different shapes or formats. The data can come from any source. ETL is powerful enough to handle such data disparities.
For example, a financial institution might have information about a client in several departments, and each department might have that client’s information listed differently. Your department might list the client by name, while your accounting department might list the client by number. ETL can bring all this data together and consolidate it into a uniform presentation, for example for archiving in a database or data warehouse.
Another way companies use ETL is to move information to another application permanently. For example, word processing data might be translated into numbers and letters, which are easier to keep track of in a spreadsheet or database program. This is especially useful for backing up information as companies transition completely to new software.
An important function of ETL is data cleansing. ETL consolidation protocols also provide for the elimination of duplicate or fragmented data, so that what moves from the E portion of the process to the L portion is easier to digest and/or store. These cleanup operations may also include deleting certain types of data from the job. If you don’t want to include certain information, you can customize your ETL to strip that type of information out of your transformation.
The T part of the equation, of course, is the most powerful. ETL can transform not only data from different departments, but also data from different sources. For example, data in an e-mail program such as Microsoft Outlook might be transformed together with data from a SAP production application, resulting in the end being data from a common thread. Microsoft, of course, makes an ETL package, as do Oracle and IBM.
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