Data virtualization uses a software abstraction layer to create an integrated data view without physically extracting, transforming, or loading the data. Organizations use this functionality as a virtual unified data repository without the expense and complexity of building and managing separate platforms for source and target. While you can use data virtualization alongside extract, transform, and load (ETL), it is increasingly seen as an alternative to ETL and other physical data integration methods. For example, you can use AWS Glue Elastic Views to quickly create a virtual table—a materialized view—from multiple different source data stores.