ETL for Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing

In terms of populating Business Intelligence and Warehouse schemas, the ETL processes are critical components of the infrastructure. They are responsible for collating the data from all operational systems and pre-processing it for the analysis and reporting tools.

Typical steps include the extraction of the data from production applications and databases (ERP, CRM, HR etc.) and the subsequent transformation of this data to reconcile it across source systems, performing calculations or string parsing, or possibly enriching it with external lookup information. This data has to match the format required by the target system whether it is a Relational structure or Star or Snowflake Schema, whilst accommodating patterns such as Slowly Changing Dimensions.

The next stage is to load this newly formed data into whichever variety of BI application you need, which comprise an ever growing list of possibilities; Data Warehouses, Data Marts, Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) cubes etc.

The ETL window is becoming shorter and shorter as the latency of ETL processes moves from daily execution to near-real-time as the need for customer information escalates. This is exacerbated by the fact that we’re seeing data volumes growing and the disparity of sources always on the increases as the data becomes more granular as businesses strive for more information

Talend’s data integration solutions are optimized for enterprise-scale data synchronisation and are designed to navigate you through the key areas of design, development, execution and maintenance of ETL processes: 

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  • Business-oriented process modeling ensuring consistency in the migration of business data and processes
  • Fully graphical development environment that improves productivity, facilitates maintenance
  • Scalable and fast execution platform with a grid approach that supports both ETL and ELT approaches
  • Broad depth of connectivity to support all source and target systems combined with the ability to easily add new source systems
  • Built-in advanced components for ETL; string manipulations, Slowly Changing Dimensions, automatic lookup handling, bulk loads support, etc.