ETL vs ELT Architecture

Data & AI Pipelines diagram · made in Skemio

Comparison architecture diagram showing legacy ETL transforming data on a staging server versus modern ELT loading raw data directly into a cloud warehouse for transformation.

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What it shows

ETL transforms data on separate compute before loading into storage.
ELT loads raw data directly, leveraging cloud warehouses for scale.
ELT preserves raw history so downstream models can always be recomputed.

The takeaway

ELT decouples ingestion from transformation, letting cloud warehouses handle massive parallel compute.

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