ETL is the short form of Extract, Transform and Load. ETL is a process of converting raw data from multiple sources to a Data warehouse. Businesses leverage this ETL process to gather, transform, organize data from various sources to a central location. This ETL process is very integral and essential to help build a Business Intelligence system in place for organizations and enterprises.
ETL stores transformed data to Data Warehouses like Azure, Redshift, and BigQuery, etc. This ETL system helps you send data back and forth between various data sources, destinations, and analytics tools. ETL helps organizations by offering Business Intelligence and executing Data Management strategies. If you would like to know more about ETL, check out this ETL tutorial.
Here we will discuss the top ETL tools of 2021, wherein they are helping businesses move data from one source to the other destination. They help them in making data both understandable and accessible in the designated storage like a Data warehouse. To get maximum efficiency, it is paramount to select the right tool to fit the process. ETL tools automate many workflows that mean without any form of human interactions. Since it is automated, it means it will be a highly available service. ETL not only helps now but also plays a huge role in playing a vital role in all future use-case scenarios.
There are many top ETL tools out there, but we have chosen a few of them:
Informatica PowerCenter
This tool helps with setting up an on-premise ETL tool that can work even with traditional database systems. Informatica helps with Data governance, monitoring, master Data management, and also Data masking. It is primarily a batch-based ETL tool which has a cloud counterpart that allows easy access to repositories that are deployed inside an organization’s premises. Informatica also supports a large number of storage solutions and software as a service (SaaS) offerings. If you are searching for a great course on Informatica, check out this Informatica Certification course. You can also watch the following video to get a better insight.
IBM InfoSphere DataStage
IBM has targeted legacy data systems that some of the bigger organizations are using. That is their market. IBM InfoSphere DataStage is an enterprise product. It is also a batch-based tool with a similar cloud version hosted in the IBM Cloud. They intend to keep the databases on-premises and execute transformation tasks in the cloud. IBM DataStage has connectors to cloud-based storage solutions just like S3 from AWS, Cloud Storage in GCP, etc.
Hevo Data
Hevo Data is widely known as an easy to learn and easy-to-use ETL tool. This tool instantly moves data when the user configures it and makes a connection between the data source and the warehouse (data warehouse). One aspect of Hevo which makes it easy to use is that it doesn’t require coding or pipeline maintenance. It also offers easy connectivity to various cloud and on-site assets.
AWS Glue
It is a real-time ETL tool that is based on AWS Cloud. All the use-cases that it supports are based on lambda functions. AWS Glue offers features like an integrated data catalog, automatic schema discovery, and many more. This capability of Glue helps it to implement a serverless full-fledged ETL pipeline.
Talend
Talend offers some of the best features in large suits of products ranging from integrating data to Big Data Management, Data protection, etc. Talend Data Fabric offers all the tools that come under Talend Umbrella along with platinum customer support. It offers many services too like connectors, SaaS offering, and many more.
Pentaho
Pentaho or Kettle, as it is known, offers both open-source as well as enterprise editions. This tool is built for an on-premise setup with data integration and processing features from disparate data sources. Pentaho also is one of those tools that rely on different cloud strategies like hybrid cloud and multi-cloud architectures.
Google Cloud Dataflow
Google also offers a fully managed ETL service that is based on Apache Beam. By using this Dataflow, it’s possible to run a completely serverless ETL pipeline that is based on Google ecosystem components. The other best thing about Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is that it is both HIPAA and GDPR compliant which means your data is secure.
Blendo
Blendo is one of the leading ETL and data integration tools out there. It simplifies the connection between data sources and databases. One of the great things about Blendo is that it automates data management and transformation for producing BI insights faster.
StreamSets
StreamSets is much more than traditional ETL. It is a DataOps, and cloud-optimized real-time tool. StreamSets uses a Spark-native execution engine to extract and transform data.
Azure Data Factory
Microsoft also has its ETL tool. It’s called Azure Data Factory. It’s a hybrid data integration service built to simplify the ETL at scale. But the downside is that Azure Data Factory is not suited for architectures based on multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud.
