What are data pipeline tools?

Data pipeline tools are used to automate data extraction, cleaning and loading in order to make the process more efficient, reliable and secure. It makes ingestion from various data sources to a single destination easier and more consistent.

There are free data pipeline tools like FOSS (free and open-source software) that can be customized to fit specific use cases. However, it can be more difficult to scale FOSS, and there is a lack of technical support.

Data pipeline tools are important because they take massive amounts of raw data and transform it into data that is ready for analytics, data apps and machine learning systems. For example, data pipeline tools can be used to deliver sales data to sales and marketing as part of a customer 360 initiative, or recommend financial services to a small business owner.