A critical component in the BI system is the ability to take your source system data, clean it, and then load it into data your warehouse. It is this quality assured data that forms the backbone of your ‘single version of the truth’ in business intelligence. To achieve the timely loading of quality assured data a software program known generically as an ETL tool is used. We’ll take the SAP BusinessObjects suite as an example. The tool is based on an ETL program originally known as Data Integrator. Data Integrator is often used with another component tool known as Data Quality. As its name suggests Data Quality provides advanced data cleansing capabilities. Metadata Manager is a third component tool that can be used closely with Data Integrator to provide visibility into data lineage and data dependencies. There are several similar ETL tools in the market the best known of which are Informatica and Microsoft’s SQLServer Integration Serices (SSIS).