What is ELT?
ELT is Extract, Load, Transform. A modern approach where raw data is loaded first, then transformed in the warehouse.
Definition
ELT flips the traditional ETL order. Instead of transforming data before loading it, ELT extracts raw data, loads it directly into a cloud warehouse, then transforms it there. This approach gained popularity because cloud warehouses like Snowflake and BigQuery have enough compute power to handle transformations at scale.
Why It Matters
ELT is faster to implement because you don't need to define transformations upfront. Load the raw data, then figure out how to transform it later. This is more flexible than ETL, but requires a warehouse with enough horsepower to handle the transformation workload.
Example
Fivetran extracts raw data from Salesforce and loads it directly into Snowflake. Then dbt runs transformation queries inside Snowflake to create clean, analytics-ready tables.