When it comes to data integration, some people may wonder what there is to discuss — isn’t it just ETL? That is, extracting from various databases, transforming, and ultimately loading into different data warehouses.  

However, with the rise of big data, data lakes, real-time data warehouses, and large-scale models, the architecture of data integration has evolved from the ETL of the data warehouse era to the ELT of the big data era and now to the current stage of EtLT. In the global tech landscape, emerging EtLT companies like FiveTran, Airbyte, and Matillion have emerged, while giants like IBM have invested $2.3 billion in acquiring StreamSets and webMethods to upgrade their product lines from ETL to EtLT (DataOps).