> Why isn't there something that can grab data from anywhere in any common format and import it into a relational database
IME, the issue is not tooling so much as dirty data. Even if a tool is a perfect solution, the data is (in the majority of companies) so dirty and inconsistently sparse that automated tooling breaks down.
Absolutely. I was trying to make a larger point that often the tooling for the stuff that can be easily automated or semi-automated is currently sub-par. If we fixed that tooling as a community then that would reduce the majority of the "janitorial work" to fixing dirty data which is definitely a harder problem. In other words, I think there is still a lot of low-hanging fruit in the ETL process.
IME, the issue is not tooling so much as dirty data. Even if a tool is a perfect solution, the data is (in the majority of companies) so dirty and inconsistently sparse that automated tooling breaks down.