October 21, 2014 \ Ananth TM Types of ETL tools If you are being asked to make a choice on the ETL tool to be used, there are various considerations we need to make. First we will understand the types of ETL tools that are available: In-House Versus Ready-Made In-House is developed in the enterprise based on requirements, whereas ready made tools make use of tools available in the market and configure them as per the requirement. Commercial license Versus Freeware Commercial licensed software come with a price tag but with promise of support. But freeware drastically reduce the cost though support may not be easily available Code-Based Versus GUI Code based requires manual code changes to build software code whereas GUI based would create code by drag and drop and configuration changes ETL versus ELT The order of processing, especially when and where the data is transformed Engine Types The processing can happen either in one or multiple CPU depending on ETL tool used and capabilities provided in that version. You can go through ETL vs ELT comparison to understand how they differ. But, today, ETL is much more than that Most ETL tools also cover: data profiling and data quality control meta data management monitoring and cleansing of the data real-time and on-demand data integration extraction of Big Data using Hadoop master data management The considerations which are needed to be checked for types of ETL are: Ease of use Support Speed Data Quality Connectivity Hardware/Software platform required Risk Cost effectiveness