Reconfigurable: Scientific ETL pipelines must be easily reconfigurable because scientific research is inherently frequently-changing. Scientists frequently decide to do new types of experiments and analyses as the very goal of doing the research is to learn information that changes their understanding of the subject of research. As they do new types of experiments, they start to track new types of information and carry out new analyses. Changing the entities, attributes, and relations that are tracked in a database is the definition of a schema change. Therefore, schema changes occur far more often in scientific research than in other fields, and the ETL pipeline needs to be easy to reconfigure when these inevitable changes occur.