If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.
—W. Edwards Deming1
Technology has progressed so quickly in the past few decades that we often forget that what today seems so simple was once quite complex. Data integration first appeared in the 1970s when company personnel recognized that they could use mainframe databases to store different types of business information. Companies and their developers produced early versions of what would become extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) tools to copy data from one or more sources ...
