ETL vs ELT: The Choice Is Cultural
ETL vs ELT is an argument about where power, cost, and control live in your data stack. ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) says you clean and shape data before it ever touches your analytics platform. ELT (Extract, Load, Transform) says you dump the raw data into a warehouse first and do the shaping there. On paper they sound like simple ordering differences. In practice they change how teams work, who owns data logic, how much things cost, and how much you can trust what comes out the other end. For developers, this isn’t an abstract architectural choice. It determines whether you spend your days babysitting brittle pipelines or writing clean, testable transformations that live in version control. Why ETL Made Sense … Read more