What Is Data Engineering?

Data has increasingly become more popular and is the backbone to many of the modern platforms available today such as Google search, Facebook, Amazon, Spotify, Uber, Tesla, AirBnB, and many more. It’s the reason why companies like Google and Facebook are some of the largest in the world. The explosive growth of some of these companies and their ability to transform whole industries, such as the music industry (Spotify) or the taxi industry (Uber), is due to their use of data.

Much of this growth is attributable to the work carried out by data engineers and data scientists. It is common to hear in the mainstream media about data science and the field of machine learning; however, the field of data engineering is just as important and plays a vital role within modern businesses.

Now this isn’t a report about the battle of data engineers versus data scientists. Instead, this report will delve into the key aspects of data engineering: why it’s an important field based on what it enables and how, together with data science, it provides the backbone to the latest tech in the industry.

Data Engineering Today

Data engineering is becoming more and more popular but is actually a role that has existed for quite some time. Data engineers have been branded in a whole host of different ways in the past, including as database administrators (DBAs), data analysts, business intelligence engineers, database developers, and more.

Recently, although the core role itself ...