ETL: definition and process

What Is ETL and How Does It Work?

To handle data chaos, we need to clean, sort, and structure data—this process is called ETL (extract, transform, load). If your business generates too much data while you’re struggling to cope with it, our team would be glad to help you deal with your data and make full use of them.

The ultimate purpose of any ETL solution is to store information in a way that helps company management extract viable insights, detect trends, and make important decisions.

The ETL solution can unite information from a variety of systems and facilitate finding the right decision by combining data sources of different nature.

What Are the Benefits of ETL?

ETL can help you turn data into business intelligence(BI) by collecting large quantities of information from different sources. It also can help managers drive valuable insights from it and find new growth opportunities. It does so by constructing a single point-of-view so you can effortlessly make sense of the data. It also allows you to put new data sets next to the old ones to give you chronological context.

As it automates the entire process, ETL saves you an excellent value of time and assists you in lower costs.

Instead of consuming time manually extracting information or using low-capacity analytics and reporting tools, you can concentrate on your core competencies while your ETL solution does all the legwork. One of the most significant advantages of ETL is ensuring data governance, that is, data usability, consistency, availability, integrity, and security.

With data, governance comes data democracy as well. That means driving your corporate data available to all employeeswho need it to conduct the proper analysis essential for driving insights and creating business intelligence(BI).

How your company can benefit from implementing a custom ETL solution?

Make decisions faster

An ETL solution enables you to collect, transform, and consolidate data in an automated way. As a result, you can take all-important management decisions faster than your competitors.

Increase profit

A well-designed ETL system delivers data ready to be used for optimizing your costs and finding growth opportunities.

Invest efficiently

An ETL solution helps ensure data governance and measure KPIs to make sure you always keep track of how efficient your investment is.

Why Do We Need ETL?

It is crucial to correctly format and prepares data to load it into the data storage system of your choice. The triple mix of ETL provides essential functions that are many times combined into a single application or suite of tools that help in the next areas:

• Offers an in-depth historical context for data.
• Extends the power of Business Intelligence(BI) solutions for decision-making.
• Helps businesses with context and data aggregations so companies can generate higher income and keep the money.
• Enables a shared data repository.
• Allows confirmation of data transformation, aggregation and calculation rules.
• Helps to sample data comparison between the source and target system.
• Allows improved productivity as it codifies and reuses without different specialized skills.

An essential ETL process categorizes in the below steps:

• Data Extraction
• Data Transformation
• Data Load

A viable direction should match your company’s needs and business requirements and perform in all the overhead steps.

ETL process

ETL is a process consisting of the following steps:

• Extract. Connecting to a data source and collecting the required information.

• Transform. The data is prepared according to the built-in algorithm and set of rules.

• Load. Storing data efficiently and securely in a way that simplifies retrieving them when needed.

Extract

It’s a process that implies extracting the information from source systems. Proper extraction is a key to successful activities in the future. Most storage projects require combining information from a variety of source systems such as relational databases, queues, REST APIs, etc. Each of such systems may use different formats. Common data formats include XML, JSON, and special file formats like Parquet.
Finally, the gist of the extraction process is to convert data into a common format set by the developer for further processing.

Transform

The transformation stage implies applying a number of functions and rules for further loading into the data warehouse. The ultimate goal of this stage is to transfer information to the final object in the required format. In some cases, the transformation may be omitted because it’s not required.
Timing-wise, the transformation takes from a few seconds to a few days, depending on the data source volume and quality. Besides, the established business and technical requirements of the final storage influence the process duration as well.

Load

The final stage implies importing data into the final database or storage. This process may vary significantly, depending on the company’s requirements:

• Replacing the existing information
• Regular updates according to the specified algorithm (daily, weekly, or monthly)
• Adding data in a historical format at fixed intervals

The frequency depends on the company’s needs and capabilities.

The next important step is to develop data visualization. Dashboards help you get insights from your data in real time and easily facilitate important business metrics.

Who needs the ETL data services?

ETL is needed by every company that wants to be a data-driven enterprise rather than being driven by emotions. For better understanding, please see a list of questions that may help you with building the ETL:

• Do you want your data to be available in real-time with a minimum lag?
• Do you want your data to be stored efficiently to ensure that you can get an answer to almost any question?
• Do you need reporting and on-the-fly KPI calculations?
• Do you want to collect data from different sources and combine them to find viable insights on the edge of this mix?

Answering ‘yes’ even to one of the above questions would mean that you need an ETL solution. There’s hardly anything we can’t implement. If you want to get a quote for ETL as a service, please feel free to contact us and get an instant response!

How Broscorp can help you build the ETL?

Building ETL solutions starts with business analysis. Broscorp sets the ultimate goal and collects the information about:

• Data sources to be collected and their connection feasibility
• Data transformations that may be required to achieve the ultimate goal
• Your data model and type of storage to be used to efficiently query and store data

Why choose Broscorp for ETL development?

Full development control

Implementing custom ETL solutions enables you to get the solution tailored to your project’s requirements. You can implement the features to match your objectives with complete control over the development process. For example, it’s essential if you need to work with specific data sources that any third-party services might not support.

Flexibility and customization solutions

A solution built from the ground up can easily keep up with the changes as your project grows and boosts. All in all, you can implement new features and customization options quickly if needed—this is impossible with third-party tools.

Complex ETL non-standard solution

Need to process terabytes of telecom data in real-time and don’t want to lose any bit of them? Need to build a highly scalable solution that can keep up if the workload increases? All the long way down the road, Broscorp creates unique and complex solutions that crunch data at supersonic speeds or utilize comprehensive mathematical transformations.

Our ETL technology stack

BI Tools:

PowerView, PowerBI, PowerPivot, PerformancePoint, Tableau, Apache Superset

Big Data:

Flume, Spark, NiFi, Kafka, Flink

Cloud:

AWS, Azure, Google Cloud

Final words

Once business analysis is done, Broscorp develops the solution using an agile workflow and tailoring it to the client’s needs at every interim stage. After development, we launch the user acceptance testing and fix all of the inaccuracies.

If you want to get a quote for your ETL solution, please contact us and get an instant reply!