Data and engineering software are two fields that are closely linked. While there are many careers in these areas that have some similarities however, they also have their own areas of expertise, which makes them distinct.
To manage large quantities of information and data at a large scale companies require experts to collect and prepare the data to be used for further analysis. These experts are referred to as data engineers. Data engineers use programming languages to develop systems that gather data transform it into data and make it more useful to other data specialists like Data scientists and Business Intelligence (BI) developers.
As they build their pipelines Data engineers take into consideration the way data is modelled as it is stored, protected and encoded. They can also suggest or implement methods to increase data reliability, efficiency and quality. They could, for instance, help end users seamlessly join data by introducing consistent IDs.
Data engineers typically create analytics applications after their ETL is completed, to help others make use of company data. This includes creating visualizations that highlight important data points such as employee and customer trends as well as product performance. They also develop and maintain data platforms that employees can access via APIs or web-based interfaces, such as a dashboard.
To accomplish this, they need to be able to operate a variety of databases and storage technologies. They could, for instance utilize SQL to query relational databases and a tool like Python for more powerful and flexible ETL processes. They could also deploy an NoSQL data store like MongoDB that provides the flexibility of document-based data management.
