Introduction to Data Engineering Pipelines Data engineering pipelines move data from many sources to places where people can use it. They automate data flow, react to changes, and scale with growing data volume. A good pipeline is reliable, observable, and easy to adjust when needs shift.
A data engineering pipeline typically includes several stages:
Ingest: collect data from apps, databases, logs, and external feeds; this step may run near real time or on a schedule. Clean and validate: fix errors, handle missing values, and ensure correct data types so downstream users see consistent results. Transform: shape data with joins, aggregations, and calculated fields. Store and organize: place data in a data lake or data warehouse with a clear, documented schema. Orchestrate: define the order of steps, handle retries, and run tasks when their dependencies are ready. Monitor and alert: track data quality, performance, and failures; alert the team when something goes wrong. A simple example helps show the flow. Imagine a website collects user events. The pipeline ingests events from the app in real time, publishes them to a message bus, enriches them with user profile data, and loads the results into a data warehouse for dashboards and reports.
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