Examples and Use Cases

To make this more approachable, all of the examples revolve around ETL pipelines that a food ordering company might build.

Moving data to an analytical dashboard

Modern companies today have multiple independent systems and databases under their command. An ETL pipeline can transfer data between these systems within the company.

For example, a food ordering company might store all its transactions and orders in the main production database. It will trigger an ETL process every four hours to pull the latest batch of order data into the data warehouse and feed a Tableau or a Power BI dashboard.

Moving data to data marts

Using ETL, we can transfer data from the data warehouse into smaller repositories called data marts.

For example, the food ordering company might have four departments: finance, marketing, sales, and product. Each department wants a data mart for itself. To assist with their requests, we can build ETL pipelines that extract data from the data warehouse, process it according to the business context of each department, and load the processed data into each of the three data marts.