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, Transform, Load (ETL)

A data integration process that extracts data from sources, transforms it in a separate engine, then loads it into a target such as a warehouse.

Definition

In ETL, cleansing, conforming and aggregation happen before loading, often in a dedicated ETL server or Spark. ETL suits cases where sensitive data must be masked before landing, or the target has limited compute. Tools include SSIS, Informatica, AWS Glue and Azure Data Factory data flows.

Exam tip

If data must be cleansed or masked before it reaches the target, choose ETL over ELT.

Related terms