ETL^2 - Educational tool for learning ETL

In Data Warehouse environments, the core Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) process is the most technically complex and sensitive of all: promoting its effective learning to undergraduate students is therefore a serious challenge. Despite today´s industrial widespread use of ETL graphical tools, these do not comply with the needs of ETL teaching given their usage complexity and high abstraction level. Moreover, no educational tools exist focused on assisting ETL teaching. For that purpose, the paper presents an innovative educational tool. The tool´s basic yet powerful features allow students to easily test concepts and also to build real-world Data Warehouse prototypes in a fast and simple fashion keeping focus on the product conceptualization without severely abstracting themselves from the background mechanisms of the ETL process. The tool has evolved in the past five years in the Decision Support Systems course of the Informatics Engineering undergraduate degree at the Polytechnic Institute of Leiria.