DATA ENGINEERING IS RATIONAL MOVEMENT OF DATA

In Fundamentals of Data Engineering, authors Joe Reis and Matt Housley captures the role of a profession in the making: The Data Engineer. Reis’ and Housley’s book must be seen through the lens of a metaphor: The wave.

Technology and trends in data management come in waves. These waves emerge on the surface in the horizon, then rise until they break and stretch towards to the shore as a flat surface only to stop, pull back, and disappear.

Tech books tend to fall into one of two categories: They either describe the wave coming in the distance or the wave as a flat surface, close to the shore, where everybody has seen it come and know why it’s there.

And then, there are those rare occasions where the tech book is the wave. A book that captures a phenomenon early, and travels with it, as the book is written and talked about while the wave rises simultaneously and readers wait for its publication.

Fundamentals of Data Engineering is such a book.

Getting talked about and hyped as it was written as the wave of data engineering was rising, the book was published in the summer of 2022 while the wave broke in a majestic roar, instantaneously catapulting Fundamentals of Data Engineering to the top of the bestseller lists and Reis & Housley into orbit, permanently flying around the planet, giving talks in cities on every continent.

A book found its readers and the readers found their book: The profession of data engineers found themselves through the body of knowledge that Fundamentals of Data engineering provided them with.

At its core, data engineering is not an end in itself but a means to an end. Data scientists have encountered the same problems again and again; that data is not made discoverable and available for their analytical activities. Enter the data engineer, that excels in one thing: Moving data in the most rational way, from the providers sources to the consumers platforms, using a large set of technologies all applicable in certain use cases and not in others.

That is how data engineering is rational movement of data, and how your organization will succeed with every data initiative it has by understanding the fundamentals of data engineering.