ETL is short for Extract, transform, and load... it typically involves reading large volumes of data from a database and processing it in massively parallel fashion and then writing out the transformed data. In other words, it's the industry term for what davorg termed "The Data Munging Mantra" in his book "Data Munging with Perl":
the input, transformation and output of data
That being said, I've enjoyed ETL using graphical dataflow environments. The major players are Teradata and Ab Initio. But I've yet to see a comparable set of tools in Perl. Sure, you can do ETL in Perl, but doing it in Perl falls short of my experience in graphical dataflow environments for the following reasons:
  1. visual overview of complete data path from input to output
  2. visual feedback on flow of data through various processing and decision elements
  3. easy and implicit parallelism from the graph itself
I certainly created a few elements in my graph which called out to Perl, but the idea of processing large volumes of data with Perl as the base of the system would seem less-than-ideal.

I'm inviting your viewpoint on this issue, especially after looking at this job description:

Candidate should be fully proficient in writing scalable, high volume ETL jobs using SQL and Perl for large volume data warehouses
UPDATE a couple more things that a graphical environment offers out of the box:
  1. Resume execution of graph by setting watch points




The mantra of every experienced web application developer is the same: thou shalt separate business logic from display. Ironically, almost all template engines allow violation of this separation principle, which is the very impetus for HTML template engine development.

-- Terence Parr, "Enforcing Strict Model View Separation in Template Engines"

In reply to ETL in Perl by metaperl

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