Engineering and data software are two different fields that work closely. Although many of the careers in these fields have some commonalities however, they have different areas of expertise, which makes them distinct.
To manage large amounts of data and information at scale companies need experts to gather and prepare the data to be used for further analysis. These specialists are known as data engineers. Data engineers use programming languages to design systems that collect data, transform it and make it usable for other data specialists such as data scientists and Business Intelligence (BI) developers.
When they design their pipelines data engineers are aware of how data is structured, stored, secured, and encoded. They could also suggest or implement methods to increase the reliability, efficiency and quality. They may, for example, help end users seamlessly join data by introducing consistent IDs.
Data engineers often create analytics applications after their ETL is completed to assist others to make use of the company’s information. This can include creating visualizations that show key data such as trends in customer and employee behavior and product performance, among more. They also create and maintain data platforms, which employees can access via APIs or web interfaces, such as a dashboard.
To do this, they should be able operate various storage and databases. They could, for instance, use SQL to query relational database and a tool like Python for more powerful and flexible ETL processes. Additionally, they can deploy a NoSQL database such as MongoDB with more flexibility in the way it applies documents to managing data.