ETL (Extraction, Transformation and Loading) are different stages in Data warehousing. Like when we do software development we follow different stages like requirement gathering, designing, coding and testing. In the similar fashion we have for data warehousing.

Extraction:-

In this process we extract data from the source. In actual scenarios data source can be in many forms EXCEL, ACCESS, Delimited text, CSV (Comma Separated Files) etc. So extraction process handle’s the complexity of understanding the data source and loading it in a structure of data warehouse.

Transformation:-

This process can also be called as cleaning up process. It’s not necessary that after the extraction process data is clean and valid. For instance all the financial figures have NULL values but you want it to be ZERO for better analysis. So you can have some kind of stored procedure which runs through all extracted records and sets the value to zero.

Loading:-

After transformation you are ready to load the information in to your final data warehouse database.