Yahoo pipes vs ETL

If you are an ETL developer, you would be handling sources like Oracle, DB2, flat files, etc.

What if your source was a website? Or a Yahoo search result? And what if you could play around with multiple websites, blogs, flickr, custom searches… mash it up together, edit and transform it to create your own version of what you want to read.

Welcome to Yahoo Pipes!

You will be surprised by its similarity to an ETL tool.

I am yet to understand it fully, but it looks interesting and fun.

Just like an ETL tool, it can handle multiple sources. Feeds, Yahoo searches, Flickr, plus few other things I am yet to understand.

And most interestingly, it has transformations… they call it operators! You have union, filter, truncate, sort, split, etc… using which you can read a 100 web sites, filter, edit and transform what you need and leave out what you don’t.

They have more options which I am yet to understand. But appears to be very interesting and offers amazing potential.