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ETL

ETL (extract, transform, load) is a critical process for data engineers to gather data from various sources, transform it into a usable format, and load it into accessible systems. The process involves three main steps: extraction from heterogeneous sources, transformation for quality and integrity, and loading into target databases, often facilitated by ETL tools or custom code. Despite its importance, challenges such as data reliability, complexity, and operational load necessitate the use of advanced tools like Delta Live Tables to streamline and automate ETL processes.

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15 views2 pages

ETL

ETL (extract, transform, load) is a critical process for data engineers to gather data from various sources, transform it into a usable format, and load it into accessible systems. The process involves three main steps: extraction from heterogeneous sources, transformation for quality and integrity, and loading into target databases, often facilitated by ETL tools or custom code. Despite its importance, challenges such as data reliability, complexity, and operational load necessitate the use of advanced tools like Delta Live Tables to streamline and automate ETL processes.

Uploaded by

shalih786
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as TXT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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ETL, which stands for extract, transform, and load, is the process data engineers

use to extract data from different sources, transform the data into a usable and
trusted resource, and load that data into the systems end-users can access and use
downstream to solve business problems.

How Does ETL Work?


Extract
The first step of this process is extracting data from the target sources that are
usually heterogeneous such as business systems, APIs, sensor data, marketing tools,
and transaction databases, and others. As you can see, some of these data types are
likely to be the structured outputs of widely used systems, while others are semi-
structured JSON server logs.There are different ways to perform the extraction:
Three Data Extraction methods:
Partial Extraction � The easiest way to obtain the data is if the if the source
system notifies you when a record has been changed
Partial Extraction (with update notification) - Not all systems can provide a
notification in case an update has taken place; however, they can point to those
records that have been changed and provide an extract of such records.
Full extract � There are certain systems that cannot identify which data has been
changed at all. In this case, a full extract is the only possibility to extract the
data out of the system. This method requires having a copy of the last extract in
the same format so you can identify the changes that have been made.
Transform
The second step consists of transforming the raw data that has been extracted from
the sources into a format that can be used by different applications. In this
stage, data gets cleansed, mapped and transformed, often to a specific schema, so
it meets operational needs. This process entails several types of transformation
that ensure the quality and integrity of data Data is not usually loaded directly
into the target data source, but instead it is common to have it uploaded into a
staging database. This step ensures a quick roll back in case something does not go
as planned. During this stage, you have the possibility to generate audit reports
for regulatory compliance, or diagnose and repair any data issues.
Load
Finally, the load function is the process of writing converted data from a staging
area to a target database, which may or may not have previously existed. Depending
on the requirements of the application, this process may be either quite simple or
intricate. Each of these steps can be done with ETL tools or custom code.
What is an ETL pipeline?
An ETL pipeline (or data pipeline) is the mechanism by which ETL processes occur.
Data pipelines are a set of tools and activities for moving data from one system
with its method of data storage and processing to another system in which it can be
stored and managed differently. Moreover, pipelines allow for automatically getting
information from many disparate sources, then transforming and consolidating it in
one high-performing data storage.
Challenges with ETL
While ETL is essential, with this exponential increase in data sources and types,
building and maintaining reliable data pipelines has become one of the more
challenging parts of data engineering. From the start, building pipelines that
ensure data reliability is slow and difficult. Data pipelines are built with
complex code and limited reusability. A pipeline built in one environment cannot be
used in another, even if the underlying code is very similar, meaning data
engineers are often the bottleneck and tasked with reinventing the wheel every
time. Beyond pipeline development, managing data quality in increasingly complex
pipeline architectures is difficult. Bad data is often allowed to flow through a
pipeline undetected, devaluing the entire data set. To maintain quality and ensure
reliable insights, data engineers are required to write extensive custom code to
implement quality checks and validation at every step of the pipeline. Finally, as
pipelines grow in scale and complexity, companies face increased operational load
managing them which makes data reliability incredibly difficult to maintain. Data
processing infrastructure has to be set up, scaled, restarted, patched, and updated
- which translates to increased time and cost. Pipeline failures are difficult to
identify and even more difficult to solve - due to lack of visibility and tooling.
Regardless of all of these challenges, reliable ETL is an absolutely critical
process for any business that hopes to be insights-driven. Without ETL tools that
maintain a standard of data reliability, teams across the business are required to
blindly make decisions without reliable metrics or reports. To continue to scale,
data engineers need tools to streamline and democratize ETL, making the ETL
lifecycle easier, and enabling data teams to build and leverage their own data
pipelines in order to get to insights faster.
Automate reliable ETL on Delta Lake
Delta Live Tables (DLT) makes it easy to build and manage reliable data pipelines
that deliver high quality data on Delta Lake. DLT helps data engineering teams
simplify ETL development and management with declarative pipeline development,
automatic testing, and deep visibility for monitoring and recovery.

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