Book Image

Building ETL Pipelines with Python

By : Brij Kishore Pandey, Emily Ro Schoof
5 (1)
Book Image

Building ETL Pipelines with Python

5 (1)
By: Brij Kishore Pandey, Emily Ro Schoof

Overview of this book

Modern extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipelines for data engineering have favored the Python language for its broad range of uses and a large assortment of tools, applications, and open source components. With its simplicity and extensive library support, Python has emerged as the undisputed choice for data processing. In this book, you’ll walk through the end-to-end process of ETL data pipeline development, starting with an introduction to the fundamentals of data pipelines and establishing a Python development environment to create pipelines. Once you've explored the ETL pipeline design principles and ET development process, you'll be equipped to design custom ETL pipelines. Next, you'll get to grips with the steps in the ETL process, which involves extracting valuable data; performing transformations, through cleaning, manipulation, and ensuring data integrity; and ultimately loading the processed data into storage systems. You’ll also review several ETL modules in Python, comparing their pros and cons when building data pipelines and leveraging cloud tools, such as AWS, to create scalable data pipelines. Lastly, you’ll learn about the concept of test-driven development for ETL pipelines to ensure safe deployments. By the end of this book, you’ll have worked on several hands-on examples to create high-performance ETL pipelines to develop robust, scalable, and resilient environments using Python.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Part 1:Introduction to ETL, Data Pipelines, and Design Principles
Free Chapter
2
Chapter 1: A Primer on Python and the Development Environment
5
Part 2:Designing ETL Pipelines with Python
11
Part 3:Creating ETL Pipelines in AWS
15
Part 4:Automating and Scaling ETL Pipelines

Testing Strategies for ETL Pipelines

The main purpose of data pipelines is to facilitate the movement of information from its source to its destination. There is strength in this simplicity. But as we’ve seen throughout this book, pipelines have far more complexity under the hood, and this makes them equally prone to errors.

We’ve talked about how errors may arise from source data anomalies, transformation bugs, infrastructure hiccups, or a host of other reasons, but we haven’t taken a deep dive into the structural components that data engineers can add to their pipeline ecosystem to ensure data integrity, reliability, and accuracy throughout the pipeline.

Testing data pipelines isn’t a one-size-fits-all process, but it can certainly be a “one-size-fits-most” initial implementation. In this chapter, we will go through a few broad strategies that every data engineer should be familiar with, as well as the considerations to keep in mind...