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There is no data engineering roadmap

alasdairb.com

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Re: There is no data engineering roadmap

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see a lot of replies saying something to the effect that "SQL is actually really testable, people just don't do it" which I'm sure is true, but probably less helpful if you're having to work on a tech stack that doesn't offer unit testing (I'm thinking something like Azure Data Factory or even some setups/configurations of airflow). Would love to hear from anyone out there who has a good test cycle for predominantl…

What I tell people about SQL is that there are two different domains: (a) operational data ingestion which is usually for the current month and (b) analytics historical data which is for all time. Think of how a business runs its finances and accounting. The analysts run daily reports to ensure the data ingested yesterday ran correctly. They enter adjusting entries as needed and call Data Engineering to fix any integ…

> So the historical data violates the new business rules.

How did you solve this? Is there a set of standard practices to address situation like this?

Re: There is no data engineering roadmap

#132

One of the problems I’ve seen with folks in data engineering is an underdeveloped sense of data modeling and table design. And this article is an example of that. It heavily emphasized SQL, but didn’t mention anything about data modeling. If you aren’t designing your tables thoughtfully, no amount of SQL proficiency will save you.

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Re: There is no data engineering roadmap

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I tell people about SQL is that there are two different domains: (a) operational data ingestion which is usually for the current month and (b) analytics historical data which is for all time. Think of how a business runs its finances and accounting. The analysts run daily reports to ensure the data ingested yesterday ran correctly. They enter adjusting entries as needed and call Data Engineering to fix any integ…

> So the historical data violates the new business rules. How did you solve this? Is there a set of standard practices to address situation like this?

There is no tech best practice I know of. Even the business finance folks have no solution. This is where idealism hits reality. Yeah it would nice to say that GitHub and source control can give you state. But as we all know code is not reality. It is an idealized representation of reality where we would like to believe business rules don’t change and things never fail.
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