ETL – Extraction, Transformation, Loading

I.T. faces a variety of challenges when it comes to delivering high-value BI systems to reporting consumers: eliminating overhead on operational systems caused by reporting and analysis needs, consolidating data from disparate data sources, accessing consistent information across the enterprise, preserving data history, and presenting data in an understandable structure to business users. Companies must address these issues to deliver business intelligence successfully.

Businesses today have a growing number of systems to collect data. These include legacy systems, ERP and non-ERP transactional systems, e-commerce applications, as well as external systems from suppliers, customers, and partners. The data in these systems keeps growing. For companies to reap a return on their data investment, they must compare information from one system to another. The ability to bring together a company’s data assets provides the necessary integration for effective business intelligence.

ETL (extraction, transformation, and loading) tools enable you to extract and unite data from disparate sources and deliver coordinated business intelligence (BI) across the organisation. Advanced data merging, aggregation, and transformation capabilities let you unite data from traditional legacy files, purchased data (such as mailing lists), and ERP data sources.