What is a Data Pipeline?
I’ve been seeing some questions about data pipelines lately. I realized I haven’t written a post that gives the level of detail necessary for a good definition of a data pipeline in the…
Professional Data Engineering Review – Sanjoy Roy
Note: this is a guest post from Sanjoy Roy who is reviewing my Professional Data Engineering course. Since late 2014, I have been drawn into various analytics projects which required a good mix of skills for both data engineering and data science. There are a lot of good MOOC available now which covers very focussed […]
Saying You Have Small Data Isn’t Belittling Your Use Case
There is a common beginner question for engineers starting out with Big Data. An engineer will do a post to a social media site saying “I need to know which Big Data technology to use. I have 3 billion rows in 10,000 files. The whole dataset is 100 GB. Is Big Data Technology X efficient […]
The Two Types of Data Engineering
There are two different types of data engineering. There are two different types of job types with the title data engineer. This is especially confusing to organizations and individuals who are starting out learning about data engineering. This confusion leads to the failure of many teams’ Big Data projects. Types of Data Engineering The first […]
Why Real-time is the Future
One of the benefits of teaching and consulting is the sheer number of organizations, teams, and people I get to work with. Since I deal with so many different groups, I can see patterns emerge much faster than others. One pattern I saw early on was real-time Big Data. Organizations wanted to do things in […]
The Four Types of Technologies You Need for Real-time Big Data Systems
Creating real-time data pipelines bring new challenges. There are new concepts and technologies that you’ll need to learn and understand. To help you understand the basic technologies you need in a real-time data pipeline, I break it down into 4 general types. These types are: Processors Analytics Ingestion and dissemination Storage Processors A processor is […]
What Are Batch and Real-time Big Data?
The move from batch to real-time Big Data represents change. It will entail using brand new technologies and concepts that you haven’t dealt with before. Batch Big Data Let’s start off by defining batch Big Data. For batch, all data must be there when the processing starts. Batch processes can run over fixed periods of […]
Data engineers vs. data scientists
I wrote a post for the O’Reilly data blog going into my latest thoughts and views on data engineers versus data scientists. I continue on to talk about machine learning engineers.
Should You Even Do Big Data?
There’s an elephant in the room with Big Data. If an organization tries to half-ass their way through a Big Data project, they’re going to fail (usually a 5-10% odds of success). Given this really low success rate, should you even do Big Data? When I worked at a Big Data vendor, I couldn’t tell […]
Unit Testing Kafka Streams
Unit testing your Kafka code is incredibly important. I’ve already written about integration testing, consumer testing, and producer testing. Now, I’m going to share how to unit test your Kafka Streams code. To start off with, you will need to change your Maven pom.xml file. You’ll need to include the test libraries for Kafka Streams […]