title: Staging in ETL: Best Practices?
body: <p>Currently, the architecture I work with takes a few data sources out of which one is staged locally because it's hosted in the cloud. The others are hosted locally anyway, so the ETL I perform takes it directly from the source. I don't really see the point in creating a stage for the other sources. </p>
  
  <p>1) Is there a distinct benefit to duplicating the locally hosted source into a local stage?</p>
  
  <p>2) Is it a better idea to host the stage on a separate machine or the same one as the Warehouse?</p>
  
  <p>3) If I'm trying to reduce my ETL time, what's a good way to do so? I was considering partitioning my data so that the important information is pulled more frequently than the "archived data". Is this a good approach, and what are my alternatives?</p>