Here I will explain various ETL tools provided by a different vendor that is available in the market.

Before we talk about all the ETL tools let us see what is ETL tool.

In ETL basically what happens is, we extract data from different sources and those sources may come in different formats.

Like

• File Format
• SQL Database
• Oracle Database

We validate the data according to the requirement and the data passed on to the target Datawarehouse.

So, this process will not happen manually. Basically, we perform this through the help of the ETL tool.

Before we talk about specific ETL tool let us discuss what are the ETL tools provided by different vendors and what are all the categories that the fall.

ETL tools coming in 3 categories.

1) Open Source

2) Commercial

3) Hybrid

The Open source tools are those which are particularly free ones. In this, we get Talend, Data Integration, and Pentaho Data Integration.

If we talk about commercial tools, they are paid ones. You need to pay a little bit to get these tools. These are

1) Informatica PowerCenter

2) Infosphere data stage

3) OWB

Now, If I talk about hybrid, basically hybrid those things which come in a portion of a little bit free as well as paid ones.

So, a portion of Talend is free but if you go for the enterprise edition of Talend you need to pay for it. So, it is not completely free that’s why it called it Hybrid.

Before we select a particular ETL tool for the integration we must know what are all other requirements of an ETL tool.

The 6 most important features of the ETL tool.

1. Connections
2. Tasks
3. Workflow
4. Execution
5. Performance
6. Management

Connections

The main important feature is connection. It has to be able to connect with different sources and those sources may come in different formats. It may come in a flat file, Oracle, A server, or google sheet.

So, if it cannot be connected to the data source, all the target systems it doesn't matter what the processing ability it has or just it has cannot be used.

Tasks

The second most important feature is the richness of the transformation to do day to day tasks such as data connection, conversion if you want to convert the data. If you want to perform expression transformations or If you want to perform joins you can do.

If you want to split the data into a single table to two tables. If you want to filter the data you can do that.

So, all of these ETL tools can do some of these tasks or some much better than others.

Workflow

So, the third important feature is workflows that arrange and connect these tasks transformations that are being performed. this includes constrains, Loops and Branching, etc.

Let me give you an example. I will say if task A is completed successfully and task B is completed successfully then only perform task C otherwise perform task D so these all conditions may come in loops that will be created in the workflow.

Execution

Now if I talk about the Execution part, when the ETL package runs it is very important to be able to log what we need to log, how it is executed, how much time it has taken when it started when it ended all these kinds of things. If it is running successfully or it fails what is the error log. So, these kinds of things may come in execution.

Performance

Performance is a very important term that should be covered in an ETL tool. Like if I give you an example. Let us assume that I have covered a project ETL and this project is processing one million rows but I wanted it to cover 10 million rows in a single processing moment. It also depends on time let us say I want this data to be get processed in one hour, not in 10 hours.

These are all the things covered in the performance. If I give you an example of bulk loading, caching and partitioning are performed in Performance.

Management

The last important feature is management or we can say administration. For example, source code control and repository, managing nodes and grid and etc.

So, keeping all these requirements if I search for top ETL tools in google. The ETL tools I am getting are

1.RightDate

2. Informatica Data Validation
3. Query Surge
4. QualiDI
5. Talend Open Studio for Data Integration

Second position I am getting Informatica. It is a top ETL testing tool.

If I search for Which is the best ETL tool? I am getting the Informatica Power Centre.

With this, we can say that Informatica is high in demand and we can get huge jobs through this platform.

Hope you are clear and this information is useful to you.

There are to phases in the data warehouse which is ETL and Reporting. 

1) ETL Tools

2) Reporting Tools

ETL tools are used to construct a data warehouse and the Reporting tools are used to utilize the data warehouse. 

ETL tools use several transformations and logics inside to make inconsistent data to the consistent form. 

It pulls the data from different source systems to the staging layer and in the staging layer ETL maintains the unique set of data and distributes to the different types of transformations to apply business rules.

Finally, the data will be transferred to the data warehouse or to the data marts depending on the business needs. 

A data warehouse is a centralized repository and the data marts are the subset of the data warehouse. 

We can say below are the top 7 ETL tools based on its durability and performance.

1. Xplenty.
2. AWS Glue.
3. Alooma.
4. Talend.
5. Stitch.
6. Informatica PowerCenter.
7. Oracle Data Integrator.

Best ETL tools are opted based on your requirements but the key functionalities can be classified based on the ability to connect to data warehouse/data lake, Connectors, SQL/Python transformations, Embedding dashboards, BI & Visualizations, Deployment methods, etc.

Here you can compare and analyze the best ETL tools for 2021