ETL Developer

Who is an ETL Developer? Roles and Responsibilities

The abbreviation ETL stands for Extract, Transform, and Load. It’s a method of moving data from various sources into a data warehouse. It is one of the crucial elements of business intelligence. An ETL developer is an IT specialist who designs data storage systems. What are the ETL developer roles and responsibilities? What does an ETL developer exactly do? In this article, we focus on the ETL developer job description and see how to become one.

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But first, let’s talk about ETL itself. It’s a data-related, three-stage process. In general, it is about transferring data from a source to a target database. During this process, ETL developers first EXTRACT data from different RDBMS source systems (Relational Database Management System–a software system used to maintain a digital database based on a relational model). Then they TRANSFORM that data and finally LOAD it into a given data warehouse system. How exactly does it happen? We have to take a closer look at this process.

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E-EXTRACT

Data is being extracted from the source system into the staging area. These source systems can be variegated–text files, SQL servers, ERP, spreadsheets, or data from vendors. The staging area allows validating extracted data before it moves into the warehouse*.

T-TRANSFORM

The previously extracted data needs to be cleansed, mapped, and transformed. All this happens in the second stage. Many validations happen during this stage, and these are filtering, cleaning, standardization, data flow validation, data threshold validation, transposing rows and columns, and many more.

L-LOAD

In the last stage, data is loaded into the target warehouse database. That’s challenging because a massive volume of data needs to be loaded in a relatively short period. Recover mechanisms and load verifications are applied before the entire process starts, to ensure that everything happens smoothly.
As you can see, it’s far more complicated than just copying-and-pasting, and the whole process needs to be continuously supervised and secured. And this is how we get to the part where the ETL developer comes in.

What does an ETL developer do–job description

An ETL Developer is an IT specialist who designs data storage systems, works to fill them with data and supervises a process of loading big data into a data warehousing software. What’s more, it’s ETL developer who’s responsible for testing its performance and troubleshooting it before it goes live. They usually work as a part of the business intelligence team. This job is complementary with such professions as business intelligence analysts, big data analysts, data scientists, and others.

A typical ETL developer job advertisement includes such roles and responsibilities as

Determines data storage needs.
Uses different data warehousing concepts to build a data warehouse for internal departments of the organization.
Creates and enhances data solutions enabling seamless delivery of data and is responsible for collecting, parsing, managing and analyzing large sets of data.
Leads the design of the logical data model and implements the physical database structure and constructs and implements operational data stores and data marts.
Designs develop, automates, and support complex applications to extract, transform, and load data.
Ensures data quality.
Develops logical and physical data flow models for ETL applications.
Translates data access, transformation, and movement requirements into functional requirements and mapping designs.

As you can see, their work is strictly related to coding and data management. That’s why this profession requires many analytical skills.

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ETL Developer skills and qualifications

To become an ETL developer, you have to display many analytical skills and personal qualifications. As JobHero.com** shows, employers are looking for candidates with these core skills.

SOFTWARE KNOWLEDGE
PL/SQL Server development experience
NoSQL databases experience
Dimensional modeling experience
Hadoop Components experience, especially HDFS, Spark, Hbase, Hive, Sqoop
OLAP, SSAS and MDX experience
Java and/or .NET experience
ETL tools experience, such as SSIS
Modeling tools experience, such as Toad Data Modeller, Erwin, and Embarcadero