ETL Tools – Executive Summary
Businesses today are driven to manage enterprise performance but face the reality that key business information at the enterprise level is still largely inaccessible. Regardless of the fact that organizations have spent countless millions on integrated systems in the past decade, the promise of integrated, enterprise level reporting and analysis capabilities is still largely a myth in corporate America.
Providing integrated enterprise management systems for reporting and analytics requires that systems be designed and built in distinctly different ways from systems that capture daily business transactions.
A family of tools exists to build these systems that provide the business views that consumers seek. The class of tools; herein referred to as Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) tools, do much more than simple move data between databases.
This paper explores the business and technology conditions which drive the need for integrated enterprise management systems. These systems are often called, "data warehouses or datamarts." It also provides an overview of ETL tools, their capabilities, and answers the question, "when does my organization need a tool?' For the Cognos client, we also explore Cognos Data Manager and explain how Data Manager simplifies managing the production oriented aspects of a typical Cognos implementation.