Extraction, Transformation and Loading (ETL) PROCESSES are critical components for feeding a data warehouse, a business intelligence system, or a big data platform. While MOSTLY invisible to users of a business intelligence platform, an ETL process retrieves data from operational systems and pre-processes it for further ANALYSIS by reporting and analytics tools. The accuracy and timeliness of the entire business intelligence platform rely on ETL processes, specifically:

• Extraction of the data from production applications and databases (ERP, CRM, RDBMS, FILES, etc.)
• Transformation of this data to reconcile it across source systems, perform calculations or string parsing, enrich it with external lookup information, and also match the format required by the TARGET system (third normal form, star schema, slowly changing dimensions, etc.)
• Loading of the resulting data into various business intelligence (BI) applications: Data Warehouse or Enterprise Data Warehouse, Data Marts, Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) applications or “cubes”, etc.

Extraction, Transformation and Loading (ETL) processes are critical components for feeding a data warehouse, a business intelligence system, or a big data platform. While mostly invisible to users of a business intelligence platform, an ETL process retrieves data from operational systems and pre-processes it for further analysis by reporting and analytics tools. The accuracy and timeliness of the entire business intelligence platform rely on ETL processes, specifically: