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Introduction To Data Engineering

Data engineering is the process of designing systems to collect and analyze raw data from various sources, enabling businesses to derive valuable insights. Data engineers are responsible for tasks such as data acquisition, cleansing, and conversion, ensuring that disparate data sets are unified for effective analysis. The document emphasizes the importance of data engineering in modern analytics and the tools and skills required for data engineers to succeed.

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28 views8 pages

Introduction To Data Engineering

Data engineering is the process of designing systems to collect and analyze raw data from various sources, enabling businesses to derive valuable insights. Data engineers are responsible for tasks such as data acquisition, cleansing, and conversion, ensuring that disparate data sets are unified for effective analysis. The document emphasizes the importance of data engineering in modern analytics and the tools and skills required for data engineers to succeed.

Uploaded by

biggykhair
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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7 minute read · April 8, 2022

Introduction to Data Engineering

Dremio Authors: Insights and Perspectives · Dremio Team

Businesses produce a lot of data. Everything from customer feedback to sales performance
and stock price influences how a company operates. But understanding what stories the data
tells isn’t always easy or intuitive, which is why many businesses rely on data engineering.

What Is Data Engineering?


Data engineering is the process of designing and building systems that let people collect and
analyze raw data from multiple sources and formats. These systems empower people to find
practical applications of the data, which businesses can use to thrive.

Why Is Data Engineering Important?


Companies of all sizes have huge amounts of disparate data to comb through to answer
critical business questions. Data engineering is designed to support the process, making it
possible for consumers of data, such as analysts, data scientists and executives, to reliably,
quickly and securely inspect all of the data available.

Data analysis is challenging because the data is managed by different technologies and stored
in various structures. Yet, the tools used for analysis assume the data is managed by the same
technology and stored in the same structure. This rift can cause headaches for anybody trying
to answer questions about business performance.

 One system contains information about billing and shipping


 Another system maintains order history
 And other systems store customer support, behavioral information and
third-party data

Together, this data provides a comprehensive view of the customer. However, these different
datasets are independent, which makes answering certain questions — like what types of
orders result in the highest customer support costs — very difficult.

Data engineering unifies these data sets and lets you find answers to your questions quickly
and efficiently.

What Do Data Engineers Do?


Data engineering is a skill that is in increasing demand. Data engineers are the people who
design the system that unifies data and can help you navigate it. Data engineers perform
many different tasks including:

 Acquisition: Finding all the different data sets around the business
 Cleansing: Finding and cleaning any errors in the data
 Conversion: Giving all the data a common format
 Disambiguation: Interpreting data that could be interpreted in multiple
ways
 Deduplication: Removing duplicate copies of data

Once this is done, data may be stored in a central repository such as a data lake or data
lakehouse. Data engineers may also copy and move subsets of data into a data warehouse.

Why Does Data Need Processing through Data


Engineering?
Data engineers play a crucial role in designing, operating, and supporting the increasingly
complex environments that power modern data analytics. Historically, data engineers have
carefully crafted data warehouse schemas, with table structures and indexes designed to
process queries quickly to ensure adequate performance. With the rise of data lakes, data
engineers have more data to manage and deliver to downstream data consumers for analytics.
Data that is stored in data lakes may be unstructured and unformatted – it needs attention
from data engineers before the business can derive value from it.
Fortunately, once a data set has been fully cleaned and formatted through data engineering,
it’s easier and faster to read and understand. Since businesses are creating data constantly, it’s
important to find software that will automate some of these processes.

The right software stack will extract a huge amount of information and value from your data,
which creates end-to-end journeys for the data known as “data pipelines.” As the information
travels through the pipeline, it may be transformed, enriched and summarized several times.

Data Engineering Tools and Skills


Data engineers use many different tools to work with data. They use a specialized skill set to
create end-to-end data pipelines that move data from source systems to target destinations.

Data engineers work with a variety of tools and technologies, including:

 ETL Tools: ETL (extract, transform, load) tools move data between
systems. They access data, then apply rules to “transform” the data
through steps that make it more suitable for analysis.
 SQL: Structured Query Language (SQL) is the standard language for
querying relational databases.
 Python: Python is a general programming language. Data engineers may
choose to use Python for ETL tasks.
 Cloud Data Storage: Including Amazon S3, Azure Data Lake Storage
(ADLS), Google Cloud Storage, etc.
 Query Engines: Engines run queries against data to return answers. Data
engineers may work with engines like Dremio Sonar, Spark, Flink, and
others.

Data Engineering vs. Data Science


Data engineering and data science are two complementary skills. Data engineers help make
data reliable and consistent for analysis. Data scientists need reliable data for machine
learning, data exploration, and other analytical projects involving large data sets. Data
scientists may rely on data engineers to find and prepare data for their analysis.

Data Engineering with Dremio


Dremio simplifies data management for data engineers and a single, unified access point for
all enterprise data for BI and ad-hoc self-service. Learn more about the data lakehouse with
Dremio.

Ready to go deeper? Read a more technical article on data engineering.


Additional Resources

RESOURCES

Apache Iceberg: The Definitive Guide

Learn More ->


RESOURCES

What Is Apache Iceberg? Features & Benefits

Learn More ->


RESOURCES

Apache Iceberg: An Architectural Look Under the Covers

Learn More ->


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