SimpleETL: ETL Processing by Simple Specifications

Massive quantities of data are today collected from many sources. However, it is often labor-intensive to handle and integrate these data sources into a data warehouse. Further, the complexity is increased when specific requirements exist. One such new requirement, is the right to be forgottenwhere an organization upon request must delete all data about an individual. Another requirement is when facts are updated retrospectively. In this paper, we present the general framework SimpleETL which is currently used for Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) processing in a company with such requirements. SimpleETL automatically handles all database interactions such as creating fact tables, dimensions, and foreign keys. The framework also has features for handling version management of facts and implements four different methods for handling deleted facts. The framework enables, e.g., data scientists, to program complete and complex ETL solutions very efficiently with only few lines of code, which is demonstrated with a real-world example.