Exploring Data Warehousing and ELT Tools

#data #dataengineering #elt #airbyte

What is a Data Warehouse?

Think of data warehouses or data lakes similar to Amazon warehouses where finished goods are sent for distribution. In the case of data, warehouses are a centralized location where company data from different department databases are sent and stored for analysis via business intelligence tools (BI). These BI tools then collect, analyze, and visualize data from various sources, and provide valuable insights to decision-makers.

What is Data Warehousing

The process of “data warehousing” involves collecting and sending data into one centralized location. Data is taken from different department databases or source systems via the ELT process (Extraction, Loading, Transformation) and sent into a staging environment.

Data Warehousing Tools

There are a variety of tools that assist in the Extract and Load process including Airbyte, Data Factory amongst others. Airbyte, a popular data integration tool, offers source connectors that enable the retrieval of data from popular APIs, databases, and SaaS platforms directly into data warehouses and lakes, including Teradata VantageCloud warehouses and lakehouses.

Airbyte Cloud, the hosted version, streamlines data ingestion with its fully managed service, eliminating the need for infrastructure setup and management.

Once the data is loaded into Teradata's warehouse or lakehouse staging environment, the transformation process begins to extract valuable and actionable insights using Teradata's ClearScape Analytics™ functions. These functions simplify data exploration, feature engineering, model training, path analysis, and more.

Extraction Tools like Airbyte also help maintain data consistency between source systems and the warehouse by continuously monitoring for updates or modifications.