Automatic Composition of ETL Workflows from Business Intents

Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) tools have provided organizations with the ability to build and maintain workflows (consisting of graphs of data transformation tasks) that can process the flood of digital age data. Currently, however, the specification of ETL workflows is largely manual, human time intensive, and error prone. As requirements become increasingly complex, users must have considerable technical expertise and domain knowledge to build and maintain these workflows. This paper describes a domain-specific modeling approach to automate the composition of data processing workflows. A high-level domain-specific language is used to assertion ally express the desired results of a workflow, from which the composition of the procedural workflow satisfying these goal statements can be generated. This problem solving approach results in an intuitive interface that is usable even by casual users for the rapid composition of workflows that are accurate and error free.