Book Image

Data Engineering with Apache Spark, Delta Lake, and Lakehouse

By : Manoj Kukreja
5 (2)
Book Image

Data Engineering with Apache Spark, Delta Lake, and Lakehouse

5 (2)
By: Manoj Kukreja

Overview of this book

In the world of ever-changing data and schemas, it is important to build data pipelines that can auto-adjust to changes. This book will help you build scalable data platforms that managers, data scientists, and data analysts can rely on. Starting with an introduction to data engineering, along with its key concepts and architectures, this book will show you how to use Microsoft Azure Cloud services effectively for data engineering. You'll cover data lake design patterns and the different stages through which the data needs to flow in a typical data lake. Once you've explored the main features of Delta Lake to build data lakes with fast performance and governance in mind, you'll advance to implementing the lambda architecture using Delta Lake. Packed with practical examples and code snippets, this book takes you through real-world examples based on production scenarios faced by the author in his 10 years of experience working with big data. Finally, you'll cover data lake deployment strategies that play an important role in provisioning the cloud resources and deploying the data pipelines in a repeatable and continuous way. By the end of this data engineering book, you'll know how to effectively deal with ever-changing data and create scalable data pipelines to streamline data science, ML, and artificial intelligence (AI) tasks.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: Modern Data Engineering and Tools
5
Section 2: Data Pipelines and Stages of Data Engineering
11
Section 3: Data Engineering Challenges and Effective Deployment Strategies

Schema evolution

Schema evolution can be described as a technique that's used to adapt to ongoing structural changes to data. As systems mature and add more functionality, schema evolution is inevitable. Therefore, adapting to schema evolution is an extremely important requirement of modern-day pipelines.

It is customary to start developing pipelines so that they have base schemas for tables at the start of the project. Frequently, by the time things move into production, there is a very high likelihood that the schema for some incoming file or table has changed. But why is this such a big problem?

Important

A data engineer should never make the mistake of assuming that the schema of incoming data will never change. Instead, prepare the pipelines so that they auto-adjust to this evolution.

Let's discuss an example scenario to illustrate this point. Let's assume your pipelines have been deployed in production and that, for a while, you have been ingesting...