The most important and most frequently under emphasized aspect of ETL system design is typically the needs assessment phase. All to commonly we spend more time selecting the ETL tools than identifying essential ETL system features. This results in one or more of the follwing situations.

• Inflexible processing and re-processing capabilities.
• Inability to automatically recover from a processing failure.
• Limited auditing, error logging and exception reporting.
• Complex, manual installation and/or configuration processes
• Data values hard coded into the ETL itself

All of these results are avoidable if enough focus is placed on the needs assesment.

To be continued