What is ETL?
![Scraping Scraping](/uploads/1/1/8/5/118526486/354232251.jpg)
Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) is the process of extracting data from various data sources, organizing it together, and storing it into a single database for later use like decision making and business insights. Before people used to perform ETL through manual coding in SQL or .NET, but today lots of ETL tools are available that simplify the process. ETL is generally used for data migration, data replication, operational processes, data transformation and data synchronization.
Extract
Best Screen Scraper Software
Extract is the first step in the ETL process and the most important step. Data is saved in various formats like in row text file, Excel or CSV files, RDMS database or in JSON or XML files. This process allows to read those different data sources and pass it to the next process which is Transform.
How to use Web Scraper? There are only a couple of steps you will need to learn in order to master web scraping: 1. Install Web Scraper and open Web Scraper tab in developer tools (which has to be placed at the bottom of the screen for Web Scraper to be visible); 2. Create a new sitemap; 3. Add data extraction selectors to the sitemap; 4. Heritrix is one of the most popular free and open-source web crawlers in Java. Actually, it is an extensible, web-scale, archival-quality web scraping project. Heritrix is a very scalable and fast solution. You can crawl/archive a set of websites in no time. ScrapeStorm is an AI-Powered visual web scraper,which can be used to extract data from almost any websites without writing any code. It is powerful and very easy to use. You only need to enter the URLs, it can intelligently identify the content and next page button, no complicated configuration, one-click scraping. ScrapeStorm is a desktop app available for Windows, Mac, and Linux users.
![Web Web](/uploads/1/1/8/5/118526486/214621941.png)
Transform
This second step transforms data into required format, it includes various operations on data such as Joining, Sorting, Filtering, Type Conversion, Lookups, Validating and other data operations and these steps make data prepared for the next step.
Load
In this last step the processed data get loaded to final destination which can be raw file, can be saved in Excel or CSV or also can be loaded in to database system like MySQL, Access or PostgreSQL and many other available options.
Open Source Web Scraper
ETL Tools and Software
There are many ETL tools available in market both commercial as well as open source like Informatica Power Center, IBM Infosphere Information Server, Oracle Data Integrator, Microsoft SQL Server Integrated Services(SSIS), Ab Initio, Sybase ETL and many more.
Web Scraping Software Comparison
ETL has big role in web scraping process. Data scraped from Public websites or other sources are not always in well format or some time it’s messy, ETL tools like Talend and other tools helps to transform the data in required format, validate them, merge them and load it to database like MySQL, NoSQL, sqLite, Oracle and many others or storage target like Amazon S3, FTP, Azure, Dropbox and others. Read More…