What is Data Engineering?

Data engineering is the practice of designing and constructing large-scale systems for collecting, storing, and analyzing data. While companies can amass vast amounts of data, they require the right expertise and technology to ensure the data is in optimal condition upon reaching data scientists and analysts. Ensuring this exploitability is the role of data engineering. Let’s delve into the explanations.

Data engineering is a discipline focused on designing, implementing, and managing data architectures. Its purpose? To cater to a company’s specific requirements regarding information analysis and processing. Data engineers are responsible for creating robust and efficient pipelines and integrating extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) processes to ensure the quality, consistency, and availability of data. To achieve this, they work closely with data scientists and analysts to ensure the data is relevant, accessible, and exploitable.

Data engineering encompasses not only database management, distributed storage, real-time data flow management, and performance optimization but also its essential mission is to ensure a strong and scalable infrastructure, a fundamental foundation for the development of a genuine data culture within a company.

What do Data Engineers do?

Behind the term data engineering are data engineers who are responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining the infrastructure necessary for effective data management within a company. Data quality management, indexing, partitioning, and replication are all part of their responsibilities. They implement monitoring and error management systems while collaborating with data science teams to design data models that meet the company’s objectives.

Benefits of Data Engineering

Within your company, integrating data engineering into your data strategy offers four main advantages.

Optimization of the Data Lifecycle Management

Data engineering ensures the Extraction, Transformation, and Loading (ETL) of data, facilitating consolidation from various sources into centralized warehouses.

Maximum Scalability

Thanks to the use of technologies like Hadoop and Spark, data engineering offers horizontal scalability, allowing companies to efficiently process massive volumes of data in real time.

Improvement of Data Quality

ETL pipelines inherently integrate data cleaning, normalization, and validation processes, thereby strengthening the reliability of analyses.

Access to the Best of Innovation

Data engineering promotes innovation by enabling the seamless integration of new technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, stimulating the creation of advanced analytical solutions for informed decision-making.

Differences Between Data Engineering and Data Science

Far from being opposed, data science and data engineering are complementary disciplines. Data engineering focuses on the design, deployment, and management of data infrastructures, playing a key role in data quality and reliability.

On the other hand, data science focuses more on advanced data analysis. For this, data science teams use different statistical techniques, machine learning algorithms, and artificial intelligence to extract insights and create predictive models.

While data engineering builds the foundations, data science explores these data to generate meaningful knowledge and forecasts. When the former contributes to building your long-term data strategy, the latter is responsible for implementing and applying it sustainably.

About Actian Corporation

Actian makes data easy. Our data platform simplifies how people connect, manage, and analyze data across cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments. With decades of experience in data management and analytics, Actian delivers high-performance solutions that empower businesses to make data-driven decisions. Actian is recognized by leading analysts and has received industry awards for performance and innovation. Our teams share proven use cases at conferences (e.g., Strata Data) and contribute to open-source projects. On the Actian blog, we cover topics ranging from real-time data ingestion, data analytics, data governance, data management, data quality, data intelligence to AI-driven analytics.