With the shift to the client-server architecture in the mid-90s, databases became more centralized and the procedures for interacting with them became more formal. In response, a new category of tooling emerged under the moniker of ETL – extract, transform, and load.
ETL tools allowed data transformations to be expressed graphically, and they included the “plumbing” necessary to run the transformations on a scheduled basis and manage exceptions that occurred during processing.
