Current Etl/elt Tools Solve One Problem, but Seems Lacking on E2e Solution
Posted2 months agoActiveabout 2 months ago
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calmnegative
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Etl/elt ToolsData IntegrationBusiness Intelligence
Key topics
Etl/elt Tools
Data Integration
Business Intelligence
I looked onto Talend, Alteryx, dbt, fivetran... They are all in etl/elt space but seems to be solving one problem and lacking on another. If a business needs a streamlined solution, there seems to be a lack of it.
The author questions the effectiveness of current ETL/ELT tools in providing a streamlined end-to-end solution for businesses, sparking a discussion on the limitations and potential alternatives.
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Nov 1, 2025 at 5:47 AM EDT
2 months ago
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Nov 13, 2025 at 12:24 PM EST
about 2 months ago
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ID: 45780434Type: storyLast synced: 11/17/2025, 7:47:46 AM
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From business managers point of view: 1. A solution that solves the problem 2. Has a management lifecycle 3. Allows productivity and team collab
dbt - code is done via VSCode and managed via git, Job Orchestration is done via Airflow or Dagster
Fivetran - its more of an ELT cloud hosted solution only, and not near real time cases.
Talend, Alteryx - Its a drag and drop first solution. Then comes IDE
My personal work experience - In my current job I was tasked to build dashboard platform which supports near real time sync. I've Postgres as main DB, Elastic search for dashboarding. Due to this near-real time requirement I had to choose a very niche library `pgsync`. Then immediately I rewrote the library again why because pgsync doesn't detect granular change and is tied to redis. Whereas I had rabbitmq as the middle layer for CDC.
The statement "dbt - code is done via VSCode" I found weird. I have used dbt but never VSCode.
The F.A.F. (Functional Architectural Flaw) is why schema drift happens silently. It's not a bug; it's a structural weakness that makes every single analytics model built on top of it fundamentally untrustworthy.
Until the data is validated at the point of entry, ETL tools are just transforming garbage. We've developed a containment protocol for this specific flaw. It requires low-level architectural intervention, not just another dashboard.
If your models keep breaking for "unknown reasons," F.A.F. is the answer.