Whether you’re working at a large enterprise or a small business, there’s almost always a need to extract data from source systems, process it, and use it for operational or analytical purposes. That process, moving data from point A to point B, transforming it along the way, and making it usable, is what we typically…
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One of the questions most data engineers need to answer is whether this data pipeline should be real-time or batch. Sometimes posed as streaming vs batch. The tools you might use to do that have changed over the past few years, but that was always the question. The business, of course, would always ask for…
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Is your data team constantly feeling the pressure to deliver? Do members of your team say they feel like they’re doing work meant for two people? If the answer to either or both of these questions is a resounding yes, you may feel tempted to think, “We just need more hands on deck.” However, hiring…
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Maybe you’re luckier than me. Maybe you’ve never opened a .sql file or an Airflow DAG only to be greeted by a 5,000+ line query…a true monster of a script that leaves you wondering where to begin. I’ve seen plenty of these, and every time, I ask myself: Why in the world do these exist? And, more…
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After working in data for over a decade, one thing that remains the same is the need to create data pipelines. Whether you call them ETLs/ELTs or something else, companies need to move and process data for analytics. The question becomes how companies are actually building their data pipelines. What ETL tools are they actually…
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If you work in data, then you’ve likely used BigQuery and you’ve likely used it without really thinking about how it operates under the hood. On the surface BigQuery is Google Cloud’s fully-managed, serverless data warehouse. It’s the Redshift of GCP except we like it a little more. The question becomes, how does it work?…
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Planning out your data infrastructure in 2025 can feel wildly different than it did even five years ago. The ecosystem is louder, flashier, and more fragmented. Everyone is talking about AI, chatbots, LLMs, vector databases, and whether your data stack is “AI-ready.” Vendors promise magic, just plug in their tool and watch your insights appear.…
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Data integration is critical for organizations of all sizes and industries—and one of the leading providers of data integration tools is Talend, which offers the flagship product Talend Studio. In 2023, Talend was acquired by Qlik, combining the two companies’ data integration and analytics tools under one roof. In January 2024, Talend discontinued Talend Open…
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Document Intelligence Studio is a data extraction tool that can pull unstructured data from diverse documents, including invoices, contracts, bank statements, pay stubs, and health insurance cards. The cloud-based tool from Microsoft Azure comes with several prebuilt models designed to extract data from popular document types. However, you can also use labeled datasets to train…
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Scraping data from PDFs is a right of passage if you work in data. Someone somewhere always needs help getting invoices parsed, contracts read through, or dozens of other use cases. Most of us will turn to Python and our trusty list of Python libraries and start plugging away. Of course, there are many challenges…
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