General data engineering articles

Data+AI Summit 2024 - Retrospective - Streaming

Welcome to the first Data+AI Summit 2024 retrospective blog post. I'm opening the series with the topic close to my heart at the moment, stream processing!

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Infoshare 2024 - Retrospective

Last May I gave a talk about stream processing fallacies at Infoshare in Gdansk. Besides this speaking experience, I was also - and maybe among others - an attendee who enjoyed several talks in software and data engineering areas. I'm writing this blog post to remember them and why not, share the knowledge with you!

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Infoshare 2024: Stream processing fallacies, part 2

The blog shares the last fallacies for my 7 years stream processing journey.

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Infoshare 2024: Stream processing fallacies, part 1

Last week I was speaking in Gdansk on the DataMass track at Infoshare. As it often happens, the talk time slot impacted what I wanted to share but maybe it's for good. Otherwise, you wouldn't read stream processing fallacies!

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Event time skew in stream processing

As a data engineer you're certainly familiar with data skew. Yes, this bad phenomena where one task takes considerably more input than the others and often causes unexpected latency or failures. Turns out, stream processing also has its skew but more related to time.

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Files streaming is quite a challenge

It's technically possible to process files in a continuous way from a streaming job. However, if you are expecting some latency sensitive job, this will always be slower than processing data directly from a streaming broker. Why?

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Streamhouse, the next house to move into?

I must admit it, if you want to catch my attention, you can use some keywords. One of them is "stream". Knowing that, the topic of my new blog post shouldn't surprise you.

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Order is king for the performance

Even though nowadays data processing frameworks and data stores have smart query planners, they don't take our responsibility to correctly design the job logic.

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Data+AI Summit 2023, retrospective part 2

One week later than initially announced, but here it is, the second part for Data+AI Summit 2023 retrospective. I don't know how, but I managed to include some streaming-related talks here too!

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Data+AI Summit 2023, retrospective part 1 - streaming

Even though you may be thinking now about Data+AI Summit 2024, I still owe you my retrospective for the 2023 edition. Let's start with the first part covering stream processing talks!

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ETL vs. ELT?

In our social media and marketing-driven era, it's quite hard to get things right. For me there is one common misconception brought by the Modern Data Stack idea that everything should be now ELT. In fact no, it shouldn't but only can.

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Berlin Buzzwords 2023 - notes for data engineers

That's the conference I've heard only recently about. What a huge mistake! Despite the lack of "data" word in the name, it covers many interesting data topics and before I share with you my notes from this year's Data+AI Summit, let me do the same for Berlin Buzzwords!

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Worth reading for data engineers - part 3

Welcome to the 3rd part of the series with great streaming and project organization blog posts summaries!

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Big Data Warsaw 2023 retrospective - for data engineers

After a 2-years break, I had a chance to speak again, this time at the Big Data Warsaw 2023. Even though I couldn't be in Warsaw that day, I enjoyed the experience and also watched other sessions available through the conference platform.

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Worth reading for data engineers - part 2

Welcome to the 2nd part of the series with great streaming and project organization blog posts summaries!

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Backpressure in the data systems

Having a scalable architecture is the nowadays must but sometimes it may not be enough to provide consistent performance. Sometimes the business requirements, such as consistent delivery time or ordered delivery, can add some additional overhead. Consequently, scalability may not suffice. Fortunately, there are other mechanisms like backpressure that can be helpful.

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Worth reading for data engineers - part 1

Hi and welcome to the new series. This time I won't blog about my discoveries. Instead, I'm going to see other blog posts from the data engineering space and share some key takeaways with you. I don't know how regular it will be yet but hopefully will be able to share some of the notes every month.

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Data contracts

Modern data space is an exciting place with a lot of innovation these last years. The single drawback of that movement are all the new buzz words and the time required to understand and classify them into something we could use in the organization or not. Recently I see more and more "data contracts" in social media. It's also a new term and I'd like to see if and how it revolutionizes the data space.

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Python alternatives to PySpark

PySpark has been getting interesting improvements making it more Python and user-friendly in each release. However, it's not the single Python-based framework for distributed data processing and people talk more and more often about the alternatives like Dask or Ray. Since both are completely new for me, I'm going to use this blog post to shed some light on them, and why not plan a deeper exploration next year?

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Unit testing in data systems can be hard

And it shouldn't be, right? After all, it's "just" about using a Unit Test framework and defining the test cases. Well, that's "just" a theory!

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