Big data engineering is the process of managing the ingestion and transformation of high volume data sets from various disparate sources within an organization. Data engineers design and build pipelines that transform and transport data to reach end users such as business analysts and data scientists. They are ultimately responsible for delivering data in a state that can produce business insights and act as a single source of truth.
What Do Data Engineers Do?
Data engineering is the critical bridge between data raw data and actionable data insights. Below are a few things that many data engineers do:
- Design, develop, test, and maintain an organization's complete complete data management system
- Manage ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) processes and manage and optimize data pipelines such as streaming data
- Build data models to reduce system complexity and reduce overall cost
- Manage and deploy disaster recovery systems and processes
Snowflake and Big Data Engineering
Snowflake streamlines big data engineering, while delivering performance and reliability, allowing organizations to easily ingest, transform, and deliver data for faster, deeper insights.
Snowpark is a developer framework for Snowflake that brings data processing and pipelines written in Python, Java, and Scala to Snowflake's elastic processing engine. For memory-intensive operations, Snowpark-optimized warehouses can be used for use cases on large data sets such as ML training, ML inference, and data exports from object storage. Snowpark-optimized warehouses have compute nodes with 16x the memory and 10x the local cache compared with standard warehouses.
With Snowflake, data engineers can spend little to no time managing infrastructure, avoiding such tasks as concurrency handling and capacity planning. Instead, they can focus their efforts on delivering data to the right stakeholders. Snowflake's platform provides batch and continuous data pipelines for various data formats; performance at scale; and simplified data transformation and architecture.