The Perfect Blend of ETL Tools & Data Warehousing

The modern business marketplace is data-driven. The word “Data” has gained more significance with time as it empowers businesses to make decisions based on facts and stats instead of hunches.

But the turbulent data generated daily is restricting an organization’s capability to filter out the noise and get the right information at the right time. Without useful data in hand, it becomes difficult for businesses to make decisions that can help them become game-changers in their respective niche.

That’s when the need for an effective data warehouse enters into the frame. Managing a data warehouse isn’t that easy as you may think. There is a lot to consider when it’s about building a robust data pipeline, like from which sources you need to collect data and how to drive the gathered information into the warehouse for analytics.

To sort the issues, the concept of ETL came into existence.

ETL is a three-tier architecture that extracts, transforms, and loads large amounts of data from disparate sources and platforms to a data warehouse for easy access. The process of ETL is all about turning the complex data silos into useful information by passing it through a series of operations like aggregating, sorting, formatting, filtering, and merging. The process is backed with graphical interfaces for instant and better results.

There are a number of ETL tools available in the market that can help you carry the data integration process with ease. The tools break down the big data silos and make it easier for data analysts to access and analyze data and turn it into business intelligence. In a nutshell, ETL tools are the first essential step in the data warehousing process that helps you make fast, informed, and reliable decisions.

Understanding the ETL Process

ETL is a data integration process that involves three steps — Extract, Transform, and Load. In short, ETL systems take large volumes of raw data from multiple platforms and sources, transform it into a common format, and load that data into a data warehouse of your choice. Let us explain the three primary ETL steps to you:

Extraction

In the first step of the ETL process, raw data is extracted from the source of its origin and placed in a staging area. The area acts as a shield between the data warehouse and the source data, mainly used to cleanse the data.

Transformation

In this step, the data goes through a series of operations like cleaning, filtering, joining, sorting, splitting, deduplication, and summarization. All the data collected from different source systems are normalized and converted into a single format, along with improving the data quality.

Loading

The final step of the ETL process is loading. It involves the loading of transformed data into a warehouse of your preference. Depending on your business needs, you can load data in batches or all at once.

The benefits of ETL and Data Warehousing

The perfect blend of ETL tools and data warehousing can help you break the big data silos and drive actionable insights that can fuel your decision-making power. The right data warehousing solution will allow you to process large volumes of data effectively, get hands-on information that can make your business thrive, and will also follow the ETL best practices. Here are a few benefits you will get post combining the power of ETL tools & data warehousing:

• Improved query and system performance: The modern data warehouses are designed, taking into account the speed of data retrieval and analysis in mind, making it easier to store loads of data and run queries faster. The main focus is on making the data analysis-ready and providing businesses with relevant data to make better decisions.
• Timely access to data: Organizations backed with the best data warehousing and ETL tools can access data from multiple sources. The solution automates the process of data integration and helps users have real-time access to crucial business information, lessening their reliance on the IT team. This way, users can spend their time and effort on data analysis instead of data gathering.
• Better quality and consistency of data: Deploying a data warehousing solution will help you with converting the data extracted from numerous sources into a common format. Apart from this, all the departments across your organization, like marketing, operations, and sales, will have consistent data to work on. This will help them coordinate their tasks and produce results that will set your business on the path to success.
• Higher return on investment: With a data warehousing solution, you can build a robust data integration pipeline and save time and money, formerly involved in the manual process of data integration. With cost-saving and focusing on data analysis, you can outline strategies that ensure better outcomes and a higher return on investment.

‍DataChannel – An integrated ETL & Reverse ETL solution

• 100+ Data Sources. DataChannel’s ever-expanding list of supported data sources includes all popular advertising, marketing, CRM, financial, and eCommerce platforms and apps along with support for ad-hoc files, google sheets, cloud storages, relational databases, and ingestion of real-time data using webhooks. If we do not have the integration you need, reach out to our team and we will build it for you for free.
• Powerful scheduling and orchestration features with granular control over scheduling down to the exact minute.
• Granular control over what data to move. Unlike most tools which are highly opinionated and dictate what data they would move, we allow you the ability to choose down to field level what data you need. If you need to add another dimension or metric down the line, our easy to use UI lets you do that in a single click without any breaking changes to your downstream process.
• Extensive Logging, fault tolerance and automated recovery allows for dependable and reliable pipelines. If we are unable to recover, the extensive notifications will alert you via slack, app and email for taking appropriate action.
• Built to scale at an affordable cost. Our best in class platform is built with all ETL best practices built to handle billions of rows of data and will scale with your business when you need them to, while allowing you to only pay for what you use today.
• Get started in minutes. Get started in minutes with our self-serve UI or with the help of our on-boarding experts who can guide you through the process. We provide extensive documentation support and content to guide you all the way.
• Managed Data Warehouse. While cloud data warehouses offer immense flexibility and opportunity, managing them can be a hassle without the right team and resources. If you do not want the trouble of managing them in-house, use our managed warehouse offering and get started today. Whenever you feel you are ready to do it in-house, simply configure your own warehouse and direct pipelines to it.
• Activate your data with Reverse ETL. Be future-ready and don’t let your data sit idle in the data warehouse or stay limited to your BI dashboards. The unidimensional approach toward data management is now undergoing a paradigm change. Instead, use DataChannel’s reverse ETL offering to send data to the tools your business teams use every day. Set up alerts & notifications on top of your data warehouse and sync customer data across all platforms converting your data warehouse into a powerful CDP (Customer Data Platform). You can even preview the data without ever leaving the platform.