ETL is not pervasive yet!

Recently I moderated a panel at the Boston TDWI chapter (I am a chapter officer) on emerging trends in business intelligence (BI). I framed the discussion by having the panelists position technology in the five stages of the Gartner Hype Cycle.

It was a lot of fun and provided some good insights. The panel agreed that ETL was on the productivity plateau -- meaning it was mainstream and commonplace. Everyone assumes everyone is doing it, but I challenged whether it was truly pervasive.

To support my claim I did an informal survey of the audience and asked some questions on their use of ETL. Sure enough, everyone was using it -- that’s great news. And everyone was using it to load their data warehouse -- again terrific.

But here is where the fun and eye-opening insight begins. When asked if they used their ETL tool to load their data marts it turns out most did not. And how many loaded their OLAP cubes with their ETL tool? Almost nobody.

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