What Is ETL?
Tim Costello, Lori Blackshear · Apress eBooks · 2019
ETL is an acronym for Extract/Transform and Load. ETL is the engine that drives your visual analytics. Without ETL you would be limited to the shape (existing layout) of the data you start with. In many cases this is OK, but as you progress in visual analytics, you will find yourself wanting to combine data sources, combine fields within data sources, or maybe even break some individual fields out into multiple fields. You might want to replace some abbreviations or codes out into the values they represent. You will certainly want to know the “shape” of your data, so you can make judgments about its trustworthiness. These are all parts of ETL, and they are all things that the Tableau Data Prep tool excels at.