0Pricing
Digital Marketing Academy · Lesson

ETL and Connectors

Pipe data in.

ETL vs ELT

Classic ETL extracts data, transforms it on an external server, then loads the clean result. Modern warehouses flip the last two steps: ELT extracts and loads raw data first, then transforms inside the warehouse using SQL.

ELT wins because warehouse compute is cheap and elastic. You keep raw data forever, can re-transform when business logic changes, and never lose detail to a premature cleanup step.

ETL  (old)  Extract -> Transform -> Load
ELT  (new)  Extract -> Load -> Transform

ELT benefits:
- raw data preserved (re-model anytime)
- transform in SQL, in the warehouse
- scales with warehouse compute

What a Connector Does

A connector is the EL engine: it authenticates to a source's API, pulls records on a schedule, and writes them into warehouse tables matching the source schema. It handles pagination, rate limits, retries, and schema changes so you don't write fragile scripts.

Managed connectors turn a week of API plumbing into a few clicks of OAuth and a sync frequency setting.

All lessons in this course

  1. Why a Warehouse
  2. ETL and Connectors
  3. Modeling Marketing Data
  4. Dashboards That Drive Action
← Back to Digital Marketing Academy