The 30 Most Useful Python Libraries For Data Engineering - by ODSC - Open Data Science - Medium
The 30 Most Useful Python Libraries For Data Engineering - by ODSC - Open Data Science - Medium
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For the upcoming Data Engineering Summit on January 18th, we’ve reached
out to some of the top experts in the field to speak on the topic. We observed
from our discussions and research that the most popular data engineering
programming languages include Python, Java, Scala, R, Julia, and C++.
However, Python continues to lead the pack thanks to its growing ecosystem
of libraries, tools, and frameworks for data engineering and related areas
such as machine learning and data science.
Regardless of metric use, many python libraries for data engineering are
useful. The importance of a Python library will depend on the content of the
task at hand. Data gleaned from our upcoming summit and also the Data
Engineering (DE) track at ODSC East 2023 identify these as some of the most
useful and popular include:
1. Library: luigi
First released by Spotify in 2011, Luigi is yet another open-source data
pipeline Python library. Similar to Airflow, it allows DEs to build and define
complex pipelines that execute a series of dependencies between tasks,
ensuring that tasks are executed in the correct order while managing
failures. Luigi also includes event monitoring that can trigger task execution.
It can be used for ETL and data ingestion and provides data cleaning and
transformation service before persisting it to data stores such as data lakes
and warehouses.
For data engineers, Airflow is a trusted tool but sometimes lacks the features
necessary for the modern data stack. Prefect was designed with these
shortcomings in mind. Prefect seeks to provide a simple, intuitive way to
build and manage complex data workflows and pipelines. It allows data
engineers to define and orchestrate pipelines, schedule, and trigger tasks,
and handle error handling and retries. Similar to other workflow python
libraries for data engineering, it can be used to extract data from various
sources, transform and clean the data, and load it into a target system or
database. It can also be used to monitor the status and progress of tasks, and
provide alerts and notifications when needed.
1. Library: kombu
Kombu and Kafka-python are similar in that they are both libraries for
working with messaging systems in Python. However, Kombu is a Python
messaging library that provides a high-level API for interacting with message
brokers such as RabbitMQ and AMQP and support for message serialization,
connection pooling, and retry handling with these brokers. Data engineers
can use Kombu to produce and consume messages from message brokers,
which can be used to build data pipelines and stream data between systems
such as producing data from a database and sending it to a message broker,
whose messages can then be consumed by another application in the
pipeline.
Pandas is one of the most popular Python libraries for working with small-
and medium-sized datasets. Built on top of NumPy, Pandas (abbreviation for
Python Data Analysis Library) is ideal for data analysis and data
manipulation. It’s considered a must-have given its large collection of
powerful features such as data merging, handling missing data, data
exploration, and overall efficiency. Data engineers use it to quickly read data
from various sources, perform analysis and transformation operations on
the data, and output the results in various formats. Pandas is also frequently
paired with other python libraries for data engineering, such as scikit-learn
for data analysis and machine learning tasks.
1. Library: pyarrow
CLOUD LIBRARIES
1. Library: boto3
Open in app
AWS is one of the most popular cloud service providers so there’s no surprise
that boto3 is on top of the list. Boto3 is a Software Development Kit (SDK)
Search Write
library for programmers to write software that makes use of a long list of
Amazon services including data engineer favorites such as Glue, EC2, RDS,
S3, Kinesis, Redshift, and Athena. In addition to performing common tasks
such as uploading and downloading data, and launching and managing EC2
instances, data engineers can leverage Boto3 to programmatically access and
manage many AWS services, that can be used to build data pipelines and
automate data workflow tasks.
1. Library: google-API-core
1. Library: Azure-core
From another of the top 5 cloud providers, Azure Core is a python library
and API for interacting with the Azure cloud services and is used by data
engineers for accessing resources and automating engineering tasks.
Common tasks include submitting and monitoring batch jobs, accessing
databases, data containers, and data lakes, and generally managing
resources such as virtual machines and containers. A related library for
Python is azure-storage-blob, a library built to manage retrieve, and store
large amounts of unstructured data such as images, audio, video, or text.
1. Library: grpcio
Building distributed API systems or microservices are a few of the use cases
that drive the popularity of the gRPC Python package. gRPC is a modern
open-source high-performance Remote Procedure Call (RPC) framework
that can run in any environment. Features, such as load balancing, health
checks, authentication bidirectional streaming, and automatic retries, make
it a powerful tool for building secure, scalable, and reliable applications. In
summary, data engineers can use grpcio to build efficient, scalable data
pipelines for distributed systems.
1. Library: SQLAlchemy
SQLAlchemy is the Python SQL toolkit that provides a high-level interface for
interacting with databases. It allows data engineers to query data from a
database using SQL-like statements and perform common operations such
as inserting, updating, and deleting data from a database. SQLAlchemy also
provides support for object-relational mapping (ORM), which allows data
engineers to define the structure of their database tables as Python classes
and map those classes to the actual database tables. SQLAlchemy provides a
full suite of well-known enterprise-level persistence patterns, designed for
efficient and high-performing database access such as connection pooling
and connection reuse.
Other notable python libraries for data engineering include PyMySQL and
sqlparse
1. Library: redis-py
Redis is a popular in-memory data store widely used in data engineering due
to its ability to scale and handle high volumes of data. It can be installed
locally or is already available on the major cloud providers. Redis-py is a
Python library that allows users to connect to a Redis database and perform
various operations such as storing and retrieving data, data transformations,
and data analysis. Redis-py can also be used to automate data engineering
tasks such as scheduling and integrating data from other sources including
extracting data from a database or API and storing it in Redis.
1. Library: pyspark
Data engineering doesn’t always mean sourcing data from data stores and
warehouses. Often, data has to be extracted from unstructured sources such
as the web or documents. Beautiful Soup is a library that makes it easy to
scrape information from web pages. It sits atop an HTML or XML parser,
providing Pythonic idioms for iterating, searching, and modifying the parse
tree. This makes Beautiful Soup a popular Python library for data
engineering because it is easy to use and allows developers to easily extract
and manipulate data from unstructured sources.
PyPI Page: https://pypi.org/project/beautifulsoup4
1. Library: PyTorch
1. Library: virtualenv
Data engineers have to work with different python libraries for data
engineering and package versions, so having an isolated virtual environment
is essential. Virtualenv is a tool to create separated Python environments to
ensure no interference across your various system setups. Since Python 3.3,
a subset of it has been integrated into the standard library under the venv
module. Virtualenv is especially important for projects that have complex
dependencies or that need to be run on different versions of Python.
1. Library: Dask
Dask was created to parallelize NumPy (the prolific Python library used for
scientific computing and data analysis) on multiple CPUs and has now
evolved into a general-purpose library for parallel computing that includes
support for Pandas DataFrames, and efficient model training on XGBoost
and scikit-learn. Data engineers have also adapted Dask due to its built-in
functions and parallel processing capabilities that make these large dataset
tasks such as data cleaning, transformation, aggregation, analysis, and
exploration (Matplotlib and Seaborn support) more efficient and faster. Data
engineers can also use Dask to scale workloads via a distributed scheduler
that can be used to schedule jobs across a cluster of machines.
1. Library: Ray
1. Library: Ansible
UTILITY LIBRARIES
1. Library: psutil
1. Library: urllib3
1. Library: python-dateutil
The need to manipulate date and time is ubiquitous in Python, and often the
built-in datetime module doesn’t suffice. The dateutil module is a popular
extension to the standard datetime module. If you’re seeking to implement
timezones, calculate time deltas, or want more powerful generic parsing,
then this library is a good choice.
1. Library: pyyaml
1. Library: pyparsing
Start off your new year right and make 2023 the year you make a difference
with your data. Register here for the free Data Engineering Live Summit!
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