There are a number of commercial and open source ETL tools available to assist in any ETL process. Some of the prominent ones are:
These tools provide a number of functions to facilitate the ETL workflow. The variety of source data types are handled automatically. A transformation engine makes it easy to create reusable scripts to handle the data mapping. Scheduling and error handling are also built in.
It is particularly advantageous to use an ETL tool in the following situations:
There are also times where the overhead and cost of setting up an ETL tool might not make sense. In these situations some combination of stored procedures, custom coding and off the shelf packages may make more sense. Scenarios of this type include: