Extract, transform, and load (ETL) tools
Spatial data is usually collected from many different sources, such as proprietary file systems, GIS tools, and third-party vendors. One of the biggest challenges for a database administrator (DBA) is to ingest all of these different formats of data, and present them in a uniform data model to their users. There are specific data loading tools (such as Shapefile, KML, and TAB file converters) to load the data from these specific file formats. In traditional database systems, an ETL tool is used to ingest data from different data sources. Now, there are several graphical user interface (GUI) driven ETL tools (both open source and third-party vendor provided) that can support many of the common spatial data formats. We look at one such ETL tool in detail to see how it can be used for the spatial data loading process.
An ETL tool supports extract, transform, and load operations. During the extract process, the tool can extract data from different source...