Translating the untranslatable: Datafold Migration Agent now supports ALL major ETL tools

Breaking the multi-billion dollar legacy ETL stranglehold

When we launched the Datafold Migration Agent, it set a new standard for migration automation: delivering an outcome – fully translated, refactored code validated to produce the same data as legacy.

Now we're raising the bar again with industry-first support for ALL major ETL tools. This breakthrough capability can translate and refactor code from even the most complex legacy systems—including GUI-based tools like Informatica, Talend, IBM DataStage, SSIS, Matillion, and Alteryx—for modern platforms like Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift, dbt and Coalesce.

The hidden barrier to AI and digital transformation

Legacy ETL tools still power millions of mission-critical data pipelines worldwide. Despite their limitations, companies continue paying billions annually in these outdated systems, with Informatica alone generating $1.6 billion in revenue. Combined with IBM, Talend, Microsoft's SSIS, and other legacy platforms, this represents a massive $10+ billion market of technical debt.

Why do organizations continue this investment? Because migration seemed nearly impossible. These decades-old platforms represent more than technical debt; they're active roadblocks to AI readiness and data innovation:

• Buried logic in GUI interfaces: Transformations hidden behind drag-and-drop elements and encoded in unreadable XML
• Multi-language complexity: Pipelines cobbled together from proprietary mappings, embedded SQL, shell scripts and UDFs
• Cross-paradigm migration: Moving from procedural-based flows to modern, declarative ELT requires complete pattern transformation
• Validation nightmares: Testing outputs across systems with different schemas, intermediate steps, and external dependencies

Beyond simple translation: True transformation

The migration landscape has evolved rapidly, with tools like Snowflake's SnowConvert, Google's BigQuery Migration Service, and Databricks' BladeBridge highlighting growing recognition of the need for better migration tooling. Even generic AI like ChatGPT is being used for simple SQL translation. But these approaches all fall short when facing legacy ETL's complexity.

These tools rely on either rules-based conversion engines that struggle with complexity or general-purpose AI that often hallucinates and has no ability to prove the quality of its output. This makes them heavily dependent on human operation to fill the gaps—either by your team or a team of consultants or SIs. More importantly, they focus only on syntax translation—not the fundamental refactoring required to modernize data workflows.

Datafold's approach is fundamentally different. Our AI-native migration engine delivers complete migration outcomes, not just tools:

1. End-to-end delivery: We manage the entire process from planning to packaging, providing production-ready code with detailed validation reports
2. Translation and refactoring: Convert GUI-based ETL workflows into modern code patterns and frameworks such as dbt or streaming. With Datafold, you can completely reimagine decades-old procedural logic as cloud-native, declarative patterns while preserving critical business logic
3. Guaranteed data parity: Our proprietary data diffing technology proves parity with automatic, value-level validation across entire production datasets

This capability fundamentally changes what's possible in migrations. What once required years of specialized human effort can now be accomplished in weeks. Long-entrenched legacy systems no longer represent an insurmountable barrier to modernization.

Ready to break free from legacy ETL? Book a demo to learn how the Datafold Migration Agent can accelerate your migration journey.