As We’ve been creating Datamartist, we’ve been trying to avoid using acronyms to describe what it is, but when I’m talking to people who have a background in data warehousing, I only have to say “its an easy to use desktop ETL tool”, and suddenly they know what I am talking about.

An Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) tool is an intermediate software application that extracts the data from the source system, transforms it (often another way to say it FIXES it) and then loads it into the destination system. They are also very expensive.

The destination system is usually a data warehouse or data mart, and most of the ETL tools available are server based.  The ETL tool and related development is key to any any data warehouse project (and represent a third or more of the cost on a typical project).

Although most ETL tools use a visual interface of one sort or another, at the core they require programming skills and specialized knowledge. Google “datastage training” and you’ll see that there is an industry grown up around learning how to use these tools.

But there’s nothing magical about it. If you ever made a spreadsheet with data from multiple sources, transformed the data, and then either made reports or moved the data into another spreadsheet then you have made (or most likely were an integral human part of) an ETL. The problem is that out of the box tools like Excel and Access are so flexible, that too much is possible.  Where to start?

The amazing thing is that EVERYONE needs ETL functionality, yet overwhelmingly the tools available are expensive, hard to learn and designed for the really, really heavy lifting.

Surely not every data manipulation task that is too much for Excel needs an enterprise ready server based ETL tool? Particularly in the current economic environment, oversized solutions are not an option.

A hard working analyst that has a bit of data analysis to do, and nothing but Excel or maybe Access on his/her desktop is short on options and long on messy spreadsheets or the need to “learn SQL in 21 easy steps”.

The vision behind Datamartist is to provide an easy to use, powerful, yet low cost data transformation tool, that guides users to generate well structured data analysis sets.  And all at a price that represents less than a single day of those consultants you have to hire to use the other software you paid too much for.

This is the perfect time find out what easy, flexible, visual data transformation can be like-  download now.