ELT - the future of data integration - Podcast with Nathaniel Spohn and Jonas Rashedi

Normally the podcast MY DATA IS BETTER THAN YOURS is a german podcast. But this time Jonas Rashedi, the host of the podcast MY DATA IS BETTER THAN YOURS is talking to an english speaking guest: Nathaniel Spohn from Fivetran. Nathaniel started working at Fivetran 5 years ago in San Francisco, then moved to Dublin to build a team there. At the moment Fivetran serves around 700 customers in the european region. Nathaniel was one of the first employees of Fivetran and loves their mission cause it's bringing a lot of value to the data-world. But why Fivetran is such a game changer? All companies want to be data driven. They want to be efficient, save money and use the data they collect to improve and grow. How could we use Fivetran? Fivetran is an automated data integration platform, that centralizes data sources in the data warehouse so you can connect your business intelligence tools to it. It's a fully managed service, robust, with a great security. Jonas and Nathaniel are speaking about the changes that are happening to the data world and compare the modern to the old data stack, the classic business intelligence against the modern business intelligence. Why is there a change and why should be rebuild our data-systems? The classic way to use data was EXTRACT - TRANSFORM - LOAD, ETL. It means to extract data, then transform it and then load it into your data warehouse. Most classic data warehouses are not in the cloud, so you have to limit the amount of data you load in and it's a huge amount of work to load it into the data warehouse, cause you need to format it before so it's perfectly designed for the data warehouse. Then you can connect your BI-tool and interpret the data. The new way to use data is EXTRACT - LOAD - TRANSFORM, ELT. This is connected to data warehouses in the cloud, that are almost unlimited. So you can upload almost all of your data before transforming it, get reports on the fly, change anything in about seconds and you have a lot more ways to use your data. This means a more agile way to use data and get the information you want, it's quick and responsive. But the way from ETL to ELT is a long way, especially for traditional companies. A lot of people that are used to the old system like the control and think it's scary to change the standardized way of data analytics. Nathaniel says: If you are used to the traditional way of ETL, you will be suprised about the speed and possibilities of ELT! Why Fivetran is such a game changer in the revolution of data integration? Fivetran uses a drag and drop model, that is very easy to understand. You don't need a lot of technical understanding to use the software. Nathaniel itself says: We wanna be the best in the world about data integration. Data integration is mostly the boring part in data departments. Good employees are difficult to find and when you find them, you want them to work on interesting things, not the boring and "dirty" data integration-part. Fivetran saves time and gives you the opportunity, to let your employees work on the "good stuff". Jonas explains that they also did the shift from ETL to ELT at Douglas and it was a very long journey, but it's totally worth it. It's best to start with a small case and then extend it, so different stakeholders get the idea of what's changing and how it's improving. Newer companies all use ETL. More traditional companies will probably migrate in the next 3-5 years. But some will still need more time. Nathaniel and Jonas are both sure: You need to change to stay on the market! To the Podcast MY DATA IS BETTER THAN YOURS: Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast... Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1CbTKaU... Zu Fivetran: https://fivetran.com To Jonas Rashedi: https://www.jonas-rashedi.de/ LinkedIn-Profile of Nathaniel Spohn:   / nathaniel-spohn-50295247   LinkedIn-Profile of Jonas Rashedi:   / jonasrashedi