Book Image

Data Engineering with AWS

By : Gareth Eagar
Book Image

Data Engineering with AWS

By: Gareth Eagar

Overview of this book

Written by a Senior Data Architect with over twenty-five years of experience in the business, Data Engineering for AWS is a book whose sole aim is to make you proficient in using the AWS ecosystem. Using a thorough and hands-on approach to data, this book will give aspiring and new data engineers a solid theoretical and practical foundation to succeed with AWS. As you progress, you’ll be taken through the services and the skills you need to architect and implement data pipelines on AWS. You'll begin by reviewing important data engineering concepts and some of the core AWS services that form a part of the data engineer's toolkit. You'll then architect a data pipeline, review raw data sources, transform the data, and learn how the transformed data is used by various data consumers. You’ll also learn about populating data marts and data warehouses along with how a data lakehouse fits into the picture. Later, you'll be introduced to AWS tools for analyzing data, including those for ad-hoc SQL queries and creating visualizations. In the final chapters, you'll understand how the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence can be used to draw new insights from data. By the end of this AWS book, you'll be able to carry out data engineering tasks and implement a data pipeline on AWS independently.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: AWS Data Engineering Concepts and Trends
6
Section 2: Architecting and Implementing Data Lakes and Data Lake Houses
13
Section 3: The Bigger Picture: Data Analytics, Data Visualization, and Machine Learning

Working with change data capture (CDC) data

One of the most challenging aspects of working within a data lake environment is the processing of updates to existing data, such as with change data capture (CDC) data. We have discussed CDC data previously, but as a reminder, this is data that contains updates to an existing dataset.

A good example of this is data that comes from a relational database system. After the initial load of data is completed to the data lake, a system (such as Amazon DMS) can read the database transaction logs and write all future database updates to Amazon S3. For each row written to Amazon S3, the first column of the CDC file would contain one of the following characters (see the section on Amazon DMS in Chapter 3, The AWS Data Engineer's Toolkit, for an example of a CDC file generated by Amazon DMS):

  • I – Insert: This indicates that this row contains data that was a new insert to the table.
  • U – Update: This indicates that...