In the data landscape, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups. The data engineers who design the Lego blocks and the data scientists who build something extraordinary out of them. These are their stories. DUN DUN! And we’re back! Last time, we went over the toolkit needed to get your foot in the door as a data engineer. You’ve gotten over the first hurdle, but I hope you haven’t fallen prey to the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

Data science is vital to business success. It’s our window into the likes and habits of our customers, creating opportunities to glean insights from the mountains of data we collect every day. Data has always helped businesses with decision-making, but AI is taking it a step further. So much so that today it can even be applied to the practice of creating impressive email subject lines. Machine learning for information management is now a key ally for every organization worldwide.

Imagine you’re driving a car. You can see what’s happening on the road in front of you, but you have no idea what’s going on under the hood. It’s like driving blindly without any gauges or a dashboard to give you vital information. You don’t know how fast you’re going, how much fuel you have left, or if something is about to go wrong. In the same way, data engineers who lack data observability are like drivers with a limited view of the road.

While in the past, businesses used data to gain an edge over their rivals, in today’s competitive environment, data is imperative to stay in business. Modern businesses rely increasingly on data to manage all aspects of their operations, from everyday workflows to impacts on business strategy and customer interactions. As a result, data stacks have become extremely complex.

Deliberations about defining your data approach often revolve around an offensive vs defensive data strategy. Here, an offensive strategy is focused on driving positive outcomes through increased revenues and profitability or by providing an enhanced customer experience. The primary objectives of an offensive data strategy are typically tailored to the product or business side of the organization, prioritizing AI and analytics use cases to drive superior commercial or financial outcomes.

The quality of your data determines how well it supports your business goals within a given context, be it in operations, planning, or decision-making. Low-quality data cannot effectively serve your purpose. Usually, decision-makers rely on data to support their decisions; however, much evidence suggests that poor or uncertain data quality can contribute to ineffective decision-making in practice.

Usually, your business users request you share the business reports in Spreadsheets. They are highly familiar with Sheets and prefer their reports on Sheets only. They assume delivering reports in XLS format is easy and quick. But, we understand the efforts and time required to export reports to Spreadsheets. Every time, you will have to run queries on your centralized data at the warehouse and then export results in XLS format. You may need to edit and update the Sheet regularly.

In today’s digital age, robust and faster data analytics is essential for your organization’s growth and success. The faster you deliver analytics-ready data to your analyst, the faster they can analyze and derive insights. Though you would have adopted the ELT process with EL data pipelines to load data quickly to the warehouse, your team would still face inefficient and delayed analysis.

ETL stands for Extract, Transform, and Load. It is defined as a Data Integration service and allows companies to combine data from various sources into a single, consistent data store that is loaded into a Data Warehouse or any other target system. ETL serves as the foundation for Machine Learning and Data Analytics workstreams. Through multiple business rules, ETL organizes and cleanses data in a way that caters to the Business Intelligence needs, like monthly reporting.

Organizations today have access to a wide stream of data. Data is generated from recommendation engines, page clicks, internet searches, product orders, and more. It is necessary to have an infrastructure that would enable you to stream your data as it gets generated and carry out analytics on the go. To aid this objective, incorporating a data pipeline for moving data from Apache Kafka to BigQuery is a step in the right direction.