Topological sorting and the ETL process

In this paper, we point out that a typical ETL process to populate a database can be thought of as an acyclic directed graph and that existing graph algorithms can thus be used to resolve the order of processing the tables in the load process. While simple databases can easily be managed manually, such methods prove very useful with big and complex data warehouses. We extend an existing sorting algorithm to provide with information on which tables can be loaded in parallel.

Download the paper here.