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

ETL testing challenges

Creating an ETL pipeline testing environment presents a unique set of challenges that extends beyond the quality and reliability of your data pipeline. We have discussed some of the potential errors to look out for, but there are additional confounding factors within your development and production environments that aren’t as easy to debug by simply looking at your code.

Data privacy and security

Depending on the purpose of your ETL pipeline, you might be moving and transforming sensitive data. Creating a test environment that accurately represents this while complying with data privacy laws (such as GDPR or CCPA) can be challenging. Data masking or obfuscation techniques are techniques that are typically used to redact sensitive data in the lower environments (i.e., dev and test), but it can be challenging to accurately create versions of sensitive prod data that remains useful for development and optimization within these environments. It’...