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Understanding the Distinctions Between Data Engineer, Data Analyst and Analytics Engineer
Imagine you have a business that sells papers online, let’s call it Dunder Mifflin. You have your customers database in a CRM tool (ex. SalesForce), your website visitors data is in Google Analytics, and your transactional data is in a third tool (ex. SAP). Now you ask your analytics guy, let’s call him Oscar, to do a presentation that requires extracting data from the different tools.
He extracts several excel sheets but their data has different formats, he then transforms and connects them after changing their formats. Finally, he loads everything into a new file to start doing his presentation. Oscar did an extract, load, transform (ETL) just to be able to do a presentation. Imagine he has to do that every time someone asks him for a presentation or for a monthly report. Most of these tasks are tedious and repetitive, not to mention the errors and inconsistencies that could happen from manually extracting and loading data. Oscar realizes that a lot of this work can be automated, and many of these errors could be avoided.
Data Engineering and the Automation of Data Processes
Oscar talks with his boss, Mr. Michael Scott, about hiring a data engineer. A data engineer is a guy who knows Python, SQL and some…