Talend Tutorial: What is Talend ETL Tool?
Prafulla Ranadive
⚡ Smart Summary
Talend is an open source data integration and data management platform whose graphical Studio generates native code for ETL, big data and cloud pipelines, and which now ships commercially as Qlik Talend Cloud.
What is Talend?
Talend is an open source software platform which offers data integration and data management solutions. Talend specialises in big data integration. The platform provides features like cloud, big data, enterprise application integration, data quality and master data management. It also provides a unified repository to store and reuse metadata.
Talend has historically been available in both an open source and a premium version, and it is widely used for cloud computing and big data integration work.
Important status update: Qlik completed its acquisition of Talend in May 2023, and on 31 January 2024 the free Talend Open Studio editions were retired — they are no longer hosted, patched or updated. The commercial platform continues as Qlik Talend Cloud. The sections below describe Open Studio as it worked while it was supported, which is still the clearest way to understand how the ETL tool is put together.
History of Talend
The milestones below trace Talend from a French R&D project to the data integration and quality engine inside Qlik’s cloud platform.
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 2002 | R&D |
| 2005 | Company Creation- First round of financing AGF private equity & Galle Partners |
| 2006 | Open Studio V1.0- Launched Us operations |
| 2007 | Integration suite/ closed second round of financing |
| 2008 | Open Profiler/ Data Quality |
| 2009 | Integration Suite RTx/MPx/ MDM acquisition |
| 2010 | IDM Community Edition/ MDM Enterprise Edition |
| 2011 | Open Studio V5 |
| 2014 | OW2 Best Project |
| 2015 | Recognized Trendsetting Product |
| 2016 | DBTA 100 |
| 2017 | Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools |
| 2021 | Native Integration of Stitch with Amazon Redshift Console |
| 2021 | Thoma Bravo takes Talend private in a deal valuing it at about $2.4 billion |
| 2023 | Qlik, also Thoma Bravo backed, completes its acquisition of Talend in May |
| 2024 | Talend Open Studio retired on 31 January; the free desktop edition receives no further updates |
| 2024 | Qlik Talend Cloud reaches general availability in July as the successor platform, adding AI-augmented pipelines, data products and a data marketplace |
| 2024 | Talend MDM Server reaches end of life on 31 December; Talend 7.3 leaves standard support in November |
| 2025 | Qlik Talend Cloud adds knowledge mart tasks that vectorise data for RAG applications, plus Talend Studio job lineage in Qlik Cloud Catalog |
| 2025 | November release brings one-click API endpoints for governed data products, automated field documentation, AI-suggested data quality rules and data stewardship |
| 2026 | At Qlik Connect in April, Qlik announces agentic data engineering: declarative pipelines, an AI Assistant for Talend Studio, real-time routing and native Open Lakehouse Streaming |
| 2026 | Paid extended support for Talend 7.3 ends in December, making Talend 8 or Qlik Talend Cloud the only supported paths |
Talend Product Suite
The Talend Product Suite consists of 3 major products, discussed below.
Talend Big Data
Talend can easily automate big data integration with graphical tools and wizards. This allows an organisation to build an environment that works with Apache Hadoop, Spark and NoSQL databases for cloud or on-premises jobs.
Many companies adopted Hadoop for cost saving and performance improvement, because enterprise solutions often consume expensive compute time. With Hadoop, data can be transformed, cleansed, enriched and integrated for heavier analytical workloads.
The Talend Sandbox includes four use cases:
- Data Warehouse Optimization
- Clickstream Analytics
- Social Media Sentiment Analysis
- Apache weblog analytics
You can also create your own, more complex use cases on top of these.
Benefits of Talend for Big Data and Hadoop
- Improves the efficiency of big data job design by arranging and configuring components in a graphical interface
- Adds data quality, scalability and management functions
- MapReduce support allows faster parallel data processing
- Shared repository and remote deployment
- Data quality and profiling with data cleansing
- Native support for HBase, HDFS, Hive, Sqoop and Pig
- Embedded in the Hortonworks Data Platform
Data Integration
The Talend data integration software has an open, scalable architecture that allows a faster response to business requests. The tool develops and deploys data integration jobs faster than hand coding.
It lets you integrate all your data with other data warehouses or synchronise data between systems. Data integration means combining data stored in different sources and giving users a unified view of it. Talend helps you manage ETL jobs and gives users simple, self-service data preparation.
Benefits of Talend for Data Integration
Agile integration: respond faster to business requests without writing code, using over 1000 out-of-the-box connectors, Eclipse-based graphical tools and an optimised-for-performance code generator.
Team productivity: collaborate using versioning, impact analysis, testing and debugging, and metadata management.
Easy management: the tool offers advanced scheduling and monitoring. It provides real-time data integration with dashboards and centralised control for fast deployment across multiple nodes.
Stay ahead of the competition: using the platform means you do not have to wait for the newest data integration features to reach you.
Low price of ownership: Talend uses a subscription pricing model. You pay for the number of developers using Talend Studio, which costs less than flat per-server licensing.
Integration Cloud
You can accelerate cloud and on-premises data integration projects using a highly scalable and secure cloud integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS). Talend Integration Cloud offers connectivity, built-in data quality and native code generation.
It is a secured cloud integration platform that allows IT and business users to connect both cloud and on-premises systems. Jobs designed in the cloud can be managed, monitored and controlled there as well.
Integration Cloud Benefits
The table below contrasts Talend Integration Cloud with the hand-coded alternative it is meant to replace.
| Talend Integration Cloud | Other Tools |
|---|---|
| 900+ drag-n-drop components | Hand coding which is unproductive |
| Generates optimized code | Need specialized skills |
| Collaboration & management | Hard to maintain |
| Gold support (SLAs) | Limited support |
What is Talend Open Studio?
Talend Open Studio was an open architecture for data integration, data profiling, big data, cloud integration and more.
It is a GUI environment that offers more than 1000 pre-built connectors. This makes it easy to perform operations such as transforming files, loading data, and moving and renaming files. Each component can be configured to define a complex process.
Integration jobs are created from Talend components that are configured instead of coded. Jobs can be run from inside the development environment, or exported and executed as standalone scripts.
Benefits of Using Talend Open Studio
- It reduces integration development time from weeks and months to days or even hours.
- It converts and updates data held in various sources.
- It monitors and manages difficult deployments with ease.
- It offers one of the lowest costs of ownership of any comparable solution.
- It inherits the power of the underlying Java programming platform.
- A wide selection of source and target connectors makes it a strong choice across the industry.
- It has strong multi-schema log file and reconciliation reporting after a data flow or migration.
Set against a traditional proprietary ETL engine, the differences look like this:
| Legacy ETL | Talend |
|---|---|
| Propriety Engine | Open |
| Hard to scale Big Data | Generates native code |
| Expensive | Low TCO |
Note: because Open Studio reached end of life on 31 January 2024, the free edition receives no security patches. Teams still running it should plan a move to Qlik Talend Cloud or another supported platform.
Talend Open Studio Architecture
The architecture splits into three key blocks — clients, server and databases — plus the workspace and repository that hold a project’s files and metadata. The diagram below shows how they connect.
Clients
The Clients block includes one or more Talend Studios and web browsers, which may run on the same or different machines. Talend Studio lets you build data integration processes regardless of data volume or process complexity.
Talend Server
The Talend server block includes a web-based application server. It enables the administration and maintenance of all projects, and it holds user accounts, access rights and project authorisation in the Administration database.
Database
The Databases block covers the Administration, Audit and Monitoring databases. Administration manages user accounts, access rights and project authorisation. The Audit database helps evaluate different aspects of jobs so that a process-oriented decision support system can be built.
Workspace
In Talend, a workspace is a directory where you store all project folders. You need at least one workspace directory per repository connection. Talend can connect to several workspace directories if you do not want to use the default one.
Repository
A repository is the storage area that Talend Open Studio uses to gather the data that describes business models or designs jobs. Keeping metadata in the repository is what makes a connection or schema reusable across jobs.
Talend Open Studio Extensions
Talend Open Studio was extended by a family of products that added governance, quality and service capabilities:
- Talend Integration Suite
- Talend On Demand
- Talend Data Quality
- Talend ESB
- Talend Big Data Integration
These names date from the Open Studio era. Under Qlik the equivalent capabilities are delivered inside Qlik Talend Cloud rather than as separate downloads.
