ETL Informatica

In the IT landscape, ETL (extract, transform and load) processes have long been used for building data warehouses and enabling reporting systems. Using business intelligence (BI) oriented ETL processes, businesses extract data from highly distributed sources, transform it through manipulation, parsing, and formatting, and load it into staging databases. From this staging area data, summarizations, and analytical processes then populate data warehouses and data marts.

Most certainly, ETL tools have their place in the IT environment, as numerous database admins utilize ETL tools to facilitate process and deliver optimal value to business.
1. Data Warehousing: Historically, the primary use for ETL tools has been to enable business intelligence. Pulling databases, application data and reference data into data warehouses provide businesses with visibility into their operations over time and enable management to make better decisions.
2. Data Integration: Data integration allows companies to migrate, transform, and consolidate information quickly and efficiently between systems of all kinds. ETL tools reduce the pain of manually entering data and allow dissimilar systems to communicate, all the while supplying a unified view.

The leading ETL tool, Informatica PowerCenter, has a long history in the data integration space. Its success can be attributed to its cross functionality, reusable components, and automatable processes. Optimized for moving large amounts of data in a batch-oriented manner, PowerCenter and similar ETL tools have been used to integrate enterprise applications across heterogeneous environments.

ETL Tools for Operational Data Integration

Operational databases house transactional data such as employee information, sales, customer feedback, and PoS information. These databases provide the foundation for the operational systems and applications that run the business. As operations increasingly required these systems to integrate with each other, existing ETL tools provided an obvious solution. Already supporting data-level connectivity to many popular databases and applications, ETL tools became a quick and seemingly simple means of connectivity and data movement. In a time when APIs were not as abundant, ETL tools were the go-to solution for operational use cases.