Understanding Data Engineering

In this chapter, you’ll learn what data engineering is and why demand for them is increasing. You’ll then discover where data engineering sits in relation to the data science lifecycle, how data engineers differ from data scientists, and have an introduction to your first complete data pipeline.

It’s time to talk about data storage—one of the main responsibilities for a data engineer. In this chapter, you’ll learn how data engineers manage different data structures, work in SQL—the programming language of choice for querying and storing data, and implement appropriate data storage solutions with data lakes and data warehouses.

Data engineers make life easy for data scientists by preparing raw data for analysis using different processing techniques at different steps. These steps need to be combined to create pipelines, which is when automation comes into play. Finally, data engineers use parallel and cloud computing to keep pipelines flowing smoothly.