ETL & Data Integration: All You Need to Know

“Be a data-driven marketer with DataChannel”

Marketing data is everywhere and highly influences every decision businesses make. Data scattered across different marketing channels need the right and ever-evolving tools and applications for their precise integration and optimum utilization.

Having large chunks of data across different marketing platforms and not having enough resources and tools to process it can deprive your organization of the growth it wants and can further question its survival.

In the present time, marketers find it quite challenging to match their pace with the exponential boost in the volume of data generated daily. The task of data integration seems like big trouble to them when it comes to breaking the complex data silos and fetching valuable insights from them. That is why the need for the best data integration and ETL tools is tremendously increasing.

The availability of the right tools at your end can help you simplify the tasks of breaking the big data silos and handling any exceptional increase in data without any difficulty.

You can collect, clean, and derive sense from data easily and effectively with DataChannel’s data warehousing solutions.

How can DataChannel help you make the most out of your data?

DataChannel offers you a cloud-native SaaS platform that helps you integrate data from several source systems and platforms into your preferred warehouse within minutes. We offer 100+ pre-built connectors that efficiently move the data from several marketing platforms to a data warehouse, without any coding.

Our data integration solutions help marketers organize the data into standardized schemas and load the same into a warehouse. The data, once loaded into the warehouse, can be transformed into the desired format via SQL.

The best thing about having our warehousing solution is that it scales as your business expands. This way, you can focus on your business growth, and we can focus on fueling your business by providing the crucial business information at the right time.

The cloud-based data integration platform is highly efficient, scalable, and cost-effective that eases the process of building a robust data infrastructure. Our solution fits perfectly into the needs of every size organization.

With DataChannel, getting your stuck data out is no longer a daunting task. Our data integration platform allows even a non-technical person to perform data integration smoothly.

All about ETL (Extrac, Transform, Load)

It is not wrong to say that in today’s time, ETL has become the foundation that carries the load of the data-driven market. It encompasses three steps — extraction, transformation, and loading. To help you understand the concept of ETL, here we are briefly explaining all the three steps:

Extract: The first step involves the extraction of data from disparate sources and ensuring that all the relevant data is collected into a single space. The data is collected directly from its original source and is in its rawest form.

Transform: In the second step of ETL, the collected data is cleaned and formatted into the desired format. The goal is to make the data easy-to-understand for the end-user. The step is carried out, maintaining the quality and integrity of data, along with removing duplicates & errors and sorting the data into the predetermined categories.

Load: Here comes the last step where the formatted data gets loaded into the target location, which can be your preferred data warehouse or business intelligence tool. After the last step, you get access to the data, which is ready for analysis and reporting.

Benefits of ETL

• Automation that saves time: The popularity of ETL is owing to its ability to automate the process of aggregating, transforming, and assembling the data. Users no longer need to manually perform the data integration process that saves them a lot of time and makes them divert their focus on other core processes.
• Zero chances of human errors: Humans are perfectionists but no matter how hard they try, it’s almost impossible to minimize the risk of manual errors to zero. Making a single mistake in the early stage of data analytics can cost a lot to organizations. With an effective ETL tool, you can avoid errors and power up your data integration process.
• Complex data is no longer an issue: ETL helps you wave goodbye to data complexity. With an efficient ETL tool, you can add location coordinates, device IDs, customers’ names, seller URLs, and time zones to make the data sets fall into their respective categories.
• Weave your path towards better decision-making: By automating the process of data integration and eliminating the chances of errors, an ETL tool ensures that you get the highest quality of data to perform analysis. With the right information at your end, you can make the best decisions to help your business thrive.
• Higher ROI: One of the best benefits of ETL is that it saves your time, efforts, and resources. By using ETL in the long run, you can boost your productivity and expect a higher ROI.

All About Data Integration

Data integration is a combination of various processes, including ETL. The process involves collecting data from different sources (both internal and external) and devices and loading it into a warehouse for the purpose of cleansing, organizing, and analyzing. With effective data integration, you can get a vivid and unified picture of your business data that further helps you make decisions that can drive better results.

The increasing need for data integration

The amount of data collected from several sources is increasing at a faster pace. Data is the most valuable resource a company can possess to streamline its operations and ensure growth.

Different businesses implement different strategies focused on utilizing the data efficiently and completing applications as soon as possible. But, are they able to use data to its full capacity? If you have the same question in mind, let us explain it to you.

As per a survey, around 60% of companies lack a feasible and precisely functional business strategy that can result in favorable outcomes.

But with data integration, the problem can be solved. By using the best data integration tools, you can access crucial business data in real-time and run analysis to derive actionable insights. Here are a few other benefits of data integration:

• Reduce complexity in data
• Add value to the data collected from different systems
• Centralize the data for making it more valuable and easy to use
• Simplifies the collaboration among various business systems
• Provide meaningful insights on which better decisions are made
• Facilitates better communication among different departments across an organization
• Update data in real-time along with maintaining data security & safety
• Delivers a better customer experience‍

‍Conclusion

ETL and data integration are two different ways to reach the same goal. Both processes have the potential to help professionals to get their relevant data combined and make it ready for analysis as seamlessly as possible. With the right data in hand, driving valuable insights becomes an easy task.

The best ETL and data integration tools give you the freedom to explore the data, transform it in any specified format, and derive meaningful insights from it. The insights give you the power to predict the future and make business decisions that can help you skyrocket your ROI.

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