Two-level Data Staging ETL for Transaction Data

Abstract

In data warehousing, Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) extracts the data from data sources into a central data warehouse regularly for the support of business decision-makings. The data from transaction processing systems are featured with the high frequent changes of insertion, update, and deletion. It is challenging for ETL to propagate the changes to the data warehouse, and maintain the change history. Moreover, ETL jobs typically run in a sequential order when processing the data with dependencies, which is not optimal, e.g., when processing early-arriving data. In this paper, we propose a two-level data staging ETL for handling transaction data. The proposed method detects the changes of the data from transactional processing systems, identifies the corresponding operation codes for the changes, and uses two staging databases to facilitate the data processing in an ETL process. The proposed ETL provides the "onestop" method for fast-changing, slowly-changing and early-arriving data processing.