Etl Tools - ETL Reporting

Posted by Raj Kamal
493 Pageviews


ETL which stands for Extract, Transform and Load are three database functions that are combined into one tool to pull data out of one database and place it into another database.

Under this there is:                                        

  • extracting data from source operational or archive systems which are the primary source of data for the data warehouse
  • transforming the data which may involve cleaning, filtering, validating and applying business rules
  • loading the data into a data warehouse or any other database or application that houses data

The main goal of using an  is to migrate data from one database to another, to form data marts and data warehouses and also to convert databases from one format or type to another.

At present the most popular and widely used ETL tools and applications on the market are. You may search for these tools in detail and discover what is the best ETL tool for your organization.



  • IBM Websphere DataStage
  • Informatica PowerCenter
  • Oracle ETL
  • Ab Initio
  • Pentaho Data Integration - Kettle Project (open source ETL)
  • SAS ETL studio
  • Cognos Decision stream
  • Business Objects Data Integrator (BODI)
  • Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)

Agreed that ETL system is the most time-consuming and expensive part of building a data warehouse but its great advantages cannot be ignored which helps in delivering superior business intelligence to your user community.

ETL tools provides visual flow and self documentation of the data, a structured system design is presented, it gives operational resilience as many ETL systems have shown many operational problems, it has Data-lineage, advanced data cleansing and data-dependency functionality. If you adopt an ETL tool, the performance of data warehouse will enhance and result in better ROI (Return on Investment).