These trends have given rise to the “Extract-Load-Transform” (ELT) architecture, which is an evolution from the traditional “Extract-Transform-Load” approach. In an ELT architecture, data is stored in its original format, and then transformed as needed, instead of being transformed prior to load. An ELT architecture is much more flexible to adapt to future (unanticipated) needs, as no information is ever thrown away. The tradeoff with ELT vs ETL is more storage costs — but with cloud storage being cheap, this almost always is worthwhile.