thinQmaster Virtual testing partner Adaptive practice exams that find your weak spots and drill them. Every answer explained. From $69
Enroll

thinQmaster

Find your exam

Five questions free, before you decide.

Step 1 · choose a vendor

In one of our camps? Your practice exams come with the tuition — they are on your study page already.

Data & Analytics · Foundational

Extract, Load, Transform (ELT)

A pattern that loads raw data into the target platform first and transforms it there using the platform's own compute.

Definition

ELT takes advantage of scalable cloud warehouses and lakehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Fabric), keeps raw data for reprocessing, and pairs with SQL transformation tools such as dbt. It is the dominant modern pattern.

Exam tip

Cloud warehouses with elastic compute favor ELT; transformations then run as SQL inside the warehouse.

Related terms