How It Works
ETL (Extract, Transform, Load)
A way of moving data: pull it out of source systems, clean and reshape it on a separate server, then load the finished version into a data warehouse. Common in older business-reporting setups.
Origin · no single documented coiner
Grew out of 1970s–80s data warehousing practice, as companies consolidated mainframe data for reporting. The acronym spread with warehouse vendors in the 1990s; there is no documented coiner.
No single primary source link for this term.