ETL Data Integration

Beers & Diapers Analogy: Why ETL Process is Important?

There’s an interesting story that’s often mentioned when talking about the power of data. And it’s called the beer and diaper analogy.

WalMart discovered through data mining that the sales of diapers and beer were correlated on Friday nights. So they placed both these items closer together and saw a remarkable increase in sales.

Now, we aren’t sure if this story is true but we certainly do know that a company can use its data to gain valuable insights and make profitable decisions.

Here’s why you need ETL to make your data insightful

• 1. ETL process saves time and effort of manually handling data

  The biggest advantage of ETL process is that it helps you gather, transform, and consolidate data in an automated way. This means you can save the time and effort of importing rows and rows of data manually.

• 2. ETL makes it easier to work with complex data

  Over time, your business has to work with a large volume of data that’s complex and diverse. For example, there could be different time zones, customers’ names, device IDs, and location.

• 3. ETL reduces risks associated with human error

  No matter how careful you are with your data, you aren’t really safe from making errors. For instance, data may be accidentally duplicated in the target system, or manual inputs could be entered incorrectly. By eliminating human intervention, an ETL tool can help you dodge such a scenario.

• 4. ETL reduces risks associated with human error

  No matter how careful you are with your data, you aren’t really safe from making errors. For instance, data may be accidentally duplicated in the target system, or manual inputs could be entered incorrectly. By eliminating human intervention, an ETL tool can help you dodge such a scenario.

• 5. ETL process boosts return on investment (ROI)

  As you save time, effort, and resources, ETL process ultimately helps you increase your ROI. Plus, by improving business intelligence, it helps boost your profits.

  This is because businesses rely on the ETL process for a consolidated data view to make better business decisions.

ETL as Service

Here are the four most common use cases of how ETL processes can boost efficiency in enterprises. Check out these ETL examples.

• 1. Synchronizing data from several sources

  Companies often have data stored in multiple independent systems.For example, if two retailers merge their ventures, they may have multiple suppliers, partners, and consumers in common. Plus, they can have data about all those entities in their respective data repositories. However, both parties may use different data repositories, and the data stored in those repositories may not always agree.
  In such a scenario, the two companies can combine their databases using an ETL tool that removes duplicates, standardizes formats, and synchronizes data.

• 2. Migrating data from legacy systems

  Another use case of ETL tools is when companies transfer data from legacy systems to an updated system.
  During data migration, an ETL tool helps extract the data from different sources, transform it to a format compatible with the new infrastructure, and then load it into the new system.
  For example, one system may have phone numbers stored with parentheses (i.e. (111)111-1111). Whereas, another may store with hyphens (i.e. 111-111-1111). An ETL tool can help ensure all those phone numbers from both source systems have the same format before storing them in the target system.

• 3. Managed Schema Changes

  Whenever a change occurs in your data, our ETL as a service automatically handles it for you to ensure you never miss an important event. You don’t need to do anything: we can re-structure the underlying data schema for optimization purposes. That way, there are no limits to all the dashboard features we offer.

• 4. Mapping Made Easy

  With our ETL as a Service, we convert your data of any type and from any source just the way you want it to be. Our Software figures out automatically the schema and enables automatic mapping of integrations. However, if you prefer to have full control over it, we can customize your mapping for you.

Proof of concept

In this new era of advanced analytics and big data, you are looking for analytical tools to harness the power of your data.It is really hard to make a decision on the selection of right analytics tools and partner.You need a tangible proof and a solid demonstration for what you are going to invest in: that’s why at LDU Business Services we are happy to create for you an individual proof of concept that will showcase the full potential of our services.It’s as easy as three steps, and will help you in your decision on whether we are a reliable partner suiting your expectations: based on a dataset of your choice that you will send us, we build a personalized data insight that you can test and show to your management or team.