Understanding ETL

ETL, in a BI project context, is the process of preparing all source data for use in an OLAP cube. The rich SSIS toolset can also be used for other types of data movement, for example, data consolidations and migrations. In this book we will focus on the BI project use of SSIS, which is extracting, transforming, and loading data from one or more source systems into an OLAP model. This process may also involve the use of an intermediate staging server that contains a staging database with staging tables. The use of a staging server and database is usually driven by the complexity and messiness of the source data. For example, in a recent project we worked on, there were 16 data sources, each with its own unique validation issues. ...

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