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

What is a data pipeline?

A data pipeline is a series of tasks, such as transformations, filters, aggregations, and merging multiple sources, before outputting the processed data into some target. In layman’s terms, a data pipeline gets data from the “source” to the “target,” as depicted in the following diagram:

Figure 2.1: A sample ETL process illustration

Figure 2.1: A sample ETL process illustration

You can think of pipelines as transport tubes in a mailroom. Mail can be placed in specific tubes and sucked up to specific processing centers. Based on specific labels, the mail is then moved and sorted into specific pathways that eventually bring it to its destination. The core concept of data pipelines is quite similar. Like mail, packets of raw data are ingested into the entry of the pipeline and, through a series of steps and processes, the raw material is formatted and packaged into an output location, which is most commonly used for storage.

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