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

Best practices for a testing environment for ETL pipelines

Like any ecosystem, each player in the group participates in altruistic, interactive relationships that build from the least complex to the most complex player. Since we need to establish a multi-layered testing strategy that covers everything from individual functions (unit testing) to the entire system (end-to-end testing), we need to discuss the key design principles for creating a testing ecosystem for data pipelines.

Defining testing objectives

Before writing any code, it’s important to determine the what and why of your task. Why do you need testing in your pipeline? What do you want to achieve with your tests? Using the previous section as a reference, this can range from verifying data integrity or confirming data transformation accuracy to validating business rules or checking pipeline performance and resilience.

Establishing a testing framework

Choose a testing framework that aligns with your technology...