In this episode of the Cloud Database Report Podcast, editor and host John Foley talks with Ciaran Dynes, Chief Product Officer of Matillion, about the  process of integrating and preparing data for cloud data warehouses. Ciaran is responsible for product strategy and incorporating customer requirements into Matillion’s products, which include software tools for data integration and ETL/ELT. 

Key topics in the interview include: 

• ETL, which stands for Extract, Transform, and Load, has been standard practice with on-premise data warehouses for 50 years. But ETL is changing in the cloud because data transformation happens in the cloud data warehouse, after data has been extracted and loaded. This new process is called ELT.
• Data must be integrated from myriad sources. Matillion says that many cloud data warehouses pull data from more than 1,000 databases, applications, and other sources.
• Data quality is an ongoing challenge, but automation can help. 

Quotes from the podcast conversation: 

• “We’ve moved to this general concept of bronze, silver, and gold versions of data.”
• “That’s the game we’re in — can we connect, combine, then synchronize back out into the operational system so we can take an action with a customer in real time?"
• “Big data forced organizations to make data a board-level and executive-level conversation.”
• “The culture of data is changing rapidly within companies.”