Skip to main content

Data Engineer

 

A data engineer is a worker whose primary job responsibility involve preparing data for analytical or operational uses. The specific tasks handled by data engineers can vary from organization to organization but typically include building data pipelines to pull together information from different source systems; integrating, consolidating and cleansing data; and structuring it for use in individual analytics applications.

The data engineer often works as part of an analytics team, providing data in a ready-to-use form to data scientists who are looking to run queries and algorithms against the information for predictive analytics, machine learning and data mining purposes. In many cases, data engineers also work with business units and departments to deliver data aggregations to executives, business analysts and other end users for more basic types of analysis to aid in ongoing operations.

Data engineers commonly deal with both structured and unstructured data sets -- as a result, they must be versed in different approaches to data architecture and applications. A variety of big data technologies, including an ever-growing assortment of open-source data ingestion and processing frameworks, are also part of the data engineer's tool kit.

To carry out their duties, data engineers can be expected to have skills in such programming languages as C#, Java, Python, Ruby, Scala and SQL. They also need a good understanding of extract, transform and load tools and REST-oriented APIs for creating and managing data integration jobs, and providing data analysts and business users with simplified access to prepared data sets.

Hadoop data lakes that offload some of the processing and storage work of established enterprise data warehouses have been a chief area of application for the data engineer in support of big data analytics efforts. NoSQL databases and Apache Spark systems are also becoming increasingly common components of the data workflows set up by data engineers. Another area of focus is Lambda architecture, which supports unified data pipelines for both batch and real-time processing.

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)

A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a computer chip that performs rapid mathematical calculations, primarily for the purpose of rendering images. A GPU may be found integrated with a central processing unit (CPU) on the same circuit, on a graphics card or in the motherboard of a personal computer or server. In the early days of computing, the CPU performed these calculations. As more graphics-intensive applications such as AutoCAD were developed; however, their demands put strain on the CPU and degraded performance. GPUs came about as a way to offload those tasks from CPUs, freeing up their processing power. NVIDIA, AMD, Intel and ARM are some of the major players in the GPU market. GPU vs. CPU A graphics processing unit is able to render images more quickly than a central processing unit because of its parallel processing architecture, which allows it to perform multiple calculations at the same time. A single CPU does not have this capability, although multi...
Post a Comment
Read more

What's the difference between two-step verification and 2FA?

  The two terms, two-step verification, and two-factor authentication are synonymous, though the former is now being used more widely by the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Apple as it better conveys how the actual authentication process works. In the past, two-step verification was used to describe processes that used the same authentication factors, while two-factor authentication described processes that involved different factors, such as entering a password on a website and receiving a numerical code on a mobile device. Today, the two terms are both used to describe authentication that involves a secondary factor that is different from the first. Authentication is a vital element of access control and data security because users can be assigned access rights and be authorized to perform certain actions only after successful authentication is performed. The ways in which someone can be authenticated fall into three categories based on what is known ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Black Swan Event

A black swan event is an incident that occurs randomly and unexpectedly and has wide-spread ramifications. The event is usually followed with reflection and a flawed rationalization that it was inevitable. The phrase illustrates the frailty of inductive reasoning and the danger of making sweeping generalizations from limited observations. The term came from the idea that if a man saw a thousand swans and they were all white, he might logically conclude that all swans are white. The flaw in his logic is that even when the premises are true, the conclusion can still be false. In other words, just because the man has never seen a black swan, it does not mean they do not exist. As Dutch explorers discovered in 1697, black swans are simply outliers -- rare birds, unknown to Europeans until Willem de Vlamingh and his crew visited Australia. Statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb uses the phrase black swan as a metaphor for how humans deal with unpredictable events in his 2007...
Post a Comment
Read more