Home▸Data Science▸ETL vs ELT Pipeline Comparator

🔀 ETL vs ELT: How Cheap Cloud Compute Flipped the Pipeline Order

Toggle between ETL and ELT and watch data flow through extraction, loading and transformation stages with side-by-side timing comparisons.

Data Science3DModerate60 FPS

An interactive 3D data pipeline where you toggle between ETL and ELT and watch records flow through extraction, loading and transformation stages, with side-by-side latency bars showing exactly why the pipeline order flipped.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

In ETL, every record queues at a fixed-capacity transform engine before it can load. In ELT, raw records load straight into the cloud warehouse and transform afterward across elastic compute nodes that scale on demand.

🎮 How to Use

Switch between ETL and ELT, then adjust data volume, transform complexity and compute nodes. Watch the two latency bars react — notice how compute nodes only help ELT.

💡 Did You Know?

Separately billed, elastically scalable cloud warehouse compute is what made "load first, transform later" cheaper than running a dedicated always-on ETL server.

⚙ Under the hood

Interactive 3D side-by-side pipeline where routing raw data through transform-then-load versus load-then-transform shows how cheap cloud compute reordered the pipeline.

etleltcloud-data-warehousesdata-pipelinesdata-transformationdata-engineeringdata-science

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install