Data engineering articles

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Apache Airflow Big Data algorithms Big Data problems - solutions Data engineering patterns General Big Data General data engineering Graphs SQL

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Project Oryx - Lambda architecture for data science

Lambda architecture is one of the first officially defined Big Data architectures. However, after few time it was replaced by simpler approaches like Kappa. But despite that, you can still find the projects on Lambda and one of them which grabbed my attention is Project Oryx.

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Data deduplication with an intermediate data store

Last year I wrote a blog post about a batch layer in streaming-first architectures like Kappa. I presented there a few approaches to synchronize the streaming broker with an object or distributed file systems store, without introducing the duplicates. Some months ago I found another architectural design that I would like to share with you here.

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Data validation frameworks - Great Expectations and orchestration

So far I played with Great Expectations and discovered the main classes. Today it's time to see how to automate our data validation pipeline.

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Data validation frameworks - Great Expectations classes

In my previous post I presented a very simplified version of a Great Expectations data validation pipeline. Today, before going further and integrating the pipeline with a data orchestration tool, it's a good moment to see what's inside the framework.

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Data validation frameworks - introduction to Great Expectations

When I published my blog post about Deequ and Apache Griffin in March 2020, I thought that there was nothing more to do with data validation frameworks. Hopefully, Alexander Wagner pointed me out another framework, Great Expectations that I will discover in the series of 3 blog posts.

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Landing zone or direct writes?

I don't know whether it's a good sign or not, but I start having some convictions about building data systems. Of course, building an architecture will always be the story of trade-offs but there are some practices that I tend to prefer than the others. And in this article I will share my thoughts on one of them.

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Becoming a data engineer - a feedback of my journey

Recently a reader asked me in a PM about the things to know and to learn before starting to work as a data engineer. Since I think that my point of view may be interesting for more than 1 person (if not, I'm really sorry), I decided to write a few words about it.

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Duplicates in data engineering reprocessing - problems and solutions

Poor quality of data comes out in different forms. The incomplete datasets, inconsistent schemas, the same attribute represented in multiple formats are only some of the characteristics. Another point that I would like to address in this post, are duplicates.

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Dealing with time delta in Apache Airflow

Often in batch processing we give the pipeline some time to catch up late data, ie. the pipeline for 9 will be executed only at 11. One of methods to do so in Airflow is to compute delta on the tasks but there is a more "native" way with TimeDeltaSensor.

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DAG evolution - using start_date and end_date?

One of the greatest properties in data engineering is idempotency. No matters how many times you will run your pipeline, you will always end up with the same outcome (= 1 file, 1 new table, ...). However, this property may be easily broken when you need to evolve your pipeline. In this blog post, I will verify one possible way to manage it in Apache Airflow.

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Optimistic concurrency control - a little bit of theory and a little bit more examples

It has been a while since I didn't write about general distributed systems topics. That's the reason for this article where I will focus on the topic of an optimistic concurrency control.

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Managing task dependencies - data or triggering?

One of the most powerful features of an orchestration system is the ability to ... yes, orchestrate different and apparently unrelated pipelines. But how to do so? By directly triggering a task or by using the data?

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Dark data and data discovery in Apache Spark SQL

Preparing an AWS exam is not only a good way to discover AWS services but also more general concepts. It happened to me when I first heard about dark data during a talk presenting AWS Glue.

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Slowly changing dimensions types and Apache Spark SQL examples

Few times ago I got an interesting question in the comment about slowly changing dimensions data. Shame on me, but I encountered this term for the first time. After a quick search, I found some basic information and made a decision to document it in this blog post.

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Output invalidation pattern with time travel

Some time ago I wrote a blog post about output invalidation pattern using immutable time-based tables. Today, even though I planned to start to explore new ACID-compliant file formats only by the end of this year, I decided to cheat a little (curiosity beat me) and try to adapt the pattern to one of these formats and use time travel feature to guarantee data consistency.

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Big Data and data removal - truncate or delete?

When I started to work with data on my very first PHP and Java projects, I used only DELETE operator to remove the data. When I switched to (big) data engineering, I found more efficient ways to deal with this operation through TRUNCATE or DROP operations.

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Data validation frameworks - Deequ and Apache Griffin overview

Poor data quality is the reason for big pains of data workers. Data engineers need often to deal with JSON inconsistent schemes, data analysts have to figure out dataset issues to avoid biased reportings whereas data scientists have to spend a big amount of time preparing data for training instead of dedicating this time on model optimization. That's why having a good tool to control data quality is very important.

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Extended JSON validation with Cerberus - error definition and normalization

Last November I spoke at Paris.py meetup about integrating Cerberus with PySpark to enhance JSON validation. During the talk, I covered some points that I would like to share with you in this blog post, mostly about error definition and normalized validation.

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Apache Airflow gotchas

From time to time I try to help other people on StackOverflow and one of my tagged topics is Apache Airflow. In this blog post I'll try to show you some problems I saw there last few months.

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Output invalidation pattern

My last slides of Spark Summit 2019 were dedicated to an output invalidation pattern that is very useful to build maintainable data pipelines. In this post I will deep delve into it.

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