ETL: Cleaning, Curating, Conquering Data
What is ETL (And Why Should You Care)? ETL stands for Extract, Transform, Load – which sounds like a fancy gym workout but is actually the process of moving data from messy, scattered sources into clean, organized destinations. You take information from various places, clean it up, standardize it, and put it somewhere useful where people can actually make decisions with it. If data is the new oil, then ETL is the refinery that turns crude information into premium insights. The Three-Step Dance: Extract, Transform, Load The beauty of ETL lies in its simplicity. Extract means grabbing data from wherever it lives – your production database, that CSV file Marketing emails you every Monday, or APIs that sometimes work. Transform is where the magic happens: cleaning messy data, converting formats, calculating new fields, and basically making everything play nice together. Load is the final step where you dump the now-pristine data into your data warehouse, where analysts can query it w...