Reverse ETL is a new, innovative tool to help businesses get the most out of their data and create rich customer profiles that will push their analytics forward. But what is reverse ETL and what reasons are there for why you should be using it?
What is Reverse ETL?
Reverse ETL is a creative solution to helping businesses get the most out of their data warehouses. The data warehouse has long been the number one solution to the problem of a data silo. A silo is simply an aggregation of data that a company accumulates that is hard to access or unusable. This data doesn’t sync across multiple platforms, and it either isn’t usable or is not easily accessed.
The process for creating a data warehouse, lake, or lakehouse as a solution to the data silo is called ETL. This is not a new invocation and has been around for decades. ETL stands for Extract, Transform, and Load, and it’s the process by which data moves from a silo to a warehouse where it can become a source of truth across a company.
Surprisingly, the data warehouse eventually started to accumulate the same problems as a data silo. Data that had been extracted, transformed, and loaded into a warehouse, lake, or lakehouse was now becoming stagnant due to becoming hard to access. This created a whole new problem for businesses that were struggling to use their data effectively across their platforms and required a solution.
That’s where reverse ETL comes into the picture. This new, innovative method of pushing data across multiple platforms, and enriching data sources is a powerful tool to help bring companies the leverage they need and put the power of data use back in their hands.
So how does reverse data actually help a company and what reasons should you be utilizing reverse ETL?
What Are the Main Reasons For Using Reverse ETL?
Reverse ETL takes data from a warehouse that has become hard to access and then actively pushes it back into disparate data sources. This is a powerful way to not only spread a source of truth throughout a company but also to enrich the data at the same time. Once it has gone back to its data sources, it can be used by the departments that need it and in the process be appended and enhanced before being sent back to the warehouse for storage.
There are three areas of a business that reverse ETL can greatly improve and these are the top reasons why you should be utilizing it in your business. Those reasons are operational analytics, data automation, and data infrastructure. Let’s take a closer look at each of these.
Operational Analytics
Analytics is one of the most important aspects of utilizing your data sources. Being able to derive deeper insight into your customers can help to give your teams the tools needed to improve customer experience. Not only that, but with operational analytics driving daily decisions, you can give your teams the insight to know where and how to expend their resources wisely.
Allowing your teams to make better data-informed decisions will empower your departments to create the best customer experiences. It can also help departments understand where to not expend resources, or how to understand customers that shouldn’t take their time and efforts.
Data Automation
When it comes to servicing a larger company with the data that it needs, this can take a sizable amount of time, effort, and manpower. Generating reports for different departments, and constantly moving data out to a company can be counterproductive for the time and effort that it takes, if it’s not automated.
What’s incredible about using reverse ETL, is that a large majority of the requests that a company will want are directly linked to information that already exists in the warehouse. So, using reverse ETL to automate this response to this information by using SQL is a huge savior of valuable resources. Easy, simple SQL can move this data that already exists out to external sources and make it available to the people who need it for day-to-day operations.
This includes, support, accounting, product, finance, and sales wants. With reverse ETL, automation via SQL gets you that data when and how you want it.
Data Infrastructure
Lastly, reverse ETL can help to build personalized customer experiences, and access a variety of data sources. Because reverse ETL constantly connects the frontline of your company departments to the data that exists in the warehouse, moving it across multiple sources, or syncing to several platforms is no problem. Not only that but as you do that you can build out a better customer experience because this process enriches the data as it cycles through multiple data sources and back to the warehouse.
Conclusion
Reverse ETL is a powerful tool that’s worth looking into. It’s an innovative tool that can help to bridge the gap between your data warehouse and the several departments of your company.
