Data and engineering software are two fields that work closely together. While many careers in these fields have common paths, they have different areas of expertise that make choose engineering for studying them distinct from each other.
To manage large amounts of information and data at a large scale companies need experts to collect and organize it to be used for further analysis. These specialized experts are called data engineers. Data engineers employ programming languages to build systems that gather data transform it and make it useful for other specialists in data, such as data scientists and Business Intelligence (BI) developers.
When they design their pipelines Data engineers consider how data is modeled as it is stored, protected and encoded. They may recommend or implement ways to increase data reliability, efficiency, and quality. They may, for example, help end users seamlessly merge data by adding consistent IDs.
Data engineers typically create analytics applications after their ETL is completed to help others leverage company information. This includes creating visualizations that highlight important data points like employee and customer trends as well as product performance. They also design and manage data platforms, which employees can access via APIs or web interfaces like a dashboard.
To do this, they need to be able operate a variety databases and storage technologies. For instance, they could make use of SQL to query relational databases and an application like Python for more flexible and powerful ETL processes. Or, they could implement a NoSQL database like MongoDB with more flexibility in the way it applies documents to managing data.
