Efficient incremental loading in ETL processing for real-time data integration

ETL (extract transform load) is the widely used standard process for creating and maintaining a data warehouse (DW). ETL is the most resource-, cost- and time-demanding process in DW implementation and maintenance. Nowadays, many graphical user interfaces (GUI)-based solutions are available to facilitate the ETL processes. In spite of the high popularity of GUI-based tool, there is still some downside of such approach. This paper focuses on alternative ETL developmental approach taken by hand coding. In some contexts like research and academic work, it is appropriate to go for custom-coded solution which can be cheaper, faster and maintainable compared to any GUI-based tools. Some well-known code-based open-source ETL tools developed by the academic world have been studied in this article. Their architecture and implementation details are addressed here. The aim of this paper is to present a comparative evaluation of these code-based ETL tools. Finally, an efficient ETL model is designed to meet the near real-time responsibility of the present days.