The ELT approach offers several potential advantages, particularly in environments dealing with large data volumes and diverse data types:

• Faster data ingestion: Loading raw data into the target system is generally quicker than waiting for transformations to complete in a staging area. This means data can become available for initial exploration or specific use cases much sooner.
• Flexibility and agility: Because raw data is preserved in the target system, transformations can be iteratively developed, modified, or added as business requirements evolve. There's no need to re-ingest data from source systems if a transformation logic changes; you simply re-run the transformation on the already-loaded raw data.
• Scalability: Modern cloud data warehouses and data lakes are designed for massive scalability. ELT leverages this inherent capability by performing transformations using the robust processing engines of these target systems. This allows organizations to handle growing data volumes and complex transformations efficiently.
• Preservation of raw data: Storing raw data allows for a more complete historical record. This can be invaluable for data auditing, re-processing if errors are found in previous transformations, or for future analytical needs that aren't yet anticipated. Data scientists often benefit from having access to the most granular, untransformed data.
• Cost efficiency for certain workloads: Using the computing power of a cloud data warehouse for transformations can sometimes be more cost-effective than maintaining separate infrastructure or licensing specialized ETL tools for transformations, especially when the data warehouse offers optimized processing.
• Support for diverse data types: ELT can be well-suited for handling structured, semi-structured (like JSON or XML), and unstructured data (like text or images). Data can be loaded in its native format and transformed as needed, which can be a significant advantage in big data scenarios. This "schema-on-read" approach, where the structure is applied during processing rather than before loading, is a hallmark of ELT.