What Is ETL?
Extract, Transform, Load demystified — real-world examples of moving data between systems.
Every non-trivial business runs on more than one system. Your application has a database. Your payment processor has a database. Your email marketing tool has a database. Your analytics platform has a database. And somehow, all of these systems need to agree on who your customers are, what they've bought, and what you should do about it.
ETL — Extract, Transform, Load — is the process of moving data from one system to another while reshaping it along the way. It's the plumbing of the data world. Unglamorous, invisible when it works, and catastrophic when it doesn't.
If you've ever copied data from a spreadsheet into another format, you've done ETL by hand. The challenge is doing it reliably, automatically, and at scale.
The Three Steps
Extract is pulling data out of a sourc
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