Talend Stitch tools load data to Azure SQL Data Warehouse
Microsoft and Talend have unveiled Stitch Data Loader support for Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse. This loader for Azure arises out of data integration vendor Talend’s late-2018 acquisition of Stitch Inc.
Stitch tools are intended to help a wider spectrum of data users create multiple-source data integrations, particularly on the cloud. The Stitch loader works with the Talend Data Fabric and can move data into Azure SQL Data Warehouse while managing schema changes and security. Talend supports other clouds, as well.
Last year, Talend released a bulk uploader that supported data movement into Azure back-end cloud storage formats. The latest update with Stitch provides an easier means for users to set up diverse data ingestion on the Azure cloud.
The Stitch Data Loader for Azure SQL Data Warehouse was introduced on Feb. 7.
This tooling is an example of growth in extract, load and transform (ELT) approaches that complement or replace traditional extract, transform and load methods of data preparation. “Historically, you would have transformed the data before loading into the data warehouse,” said Dylan Baker, principal at London-based DBAnalytics and a user of Stitch software. “You did that because storage and compute in the data warehouse were expensive, and you wanted to do that work before the data got there.” Reduced cost and new tooling for cloud data warehouses now make it more feasible to dump data into the data warehouse for quicker analytical iterations, and tools like Stitch play a role in handling that data more efficiently, Baker said. In Baker’s practice, the data sources going into the cloud data warehouses are diverse, including Shopify, HubSpot and Salesforce data. JSON is a commonly used format, but in-house proprietary formats are also used. Baker has used Amazon Web Services and Redshift, as well as Google Cloud Platform and BigQuery, for cloud data warehousing. While he has not employed Microsoft Azure or Azure SQL Data Warehouse, he said customers he works with see Azure cloud capabilities becoming more popular and catching up to the Amazon Redshift franchise.
