There is nothing more annoying than sitting around waiting for files to download. That was true while I was in high school staring at LimeWire, it’s still true today. Especially when you’re a data engineer who’s supposed to make data pipelines fast. You’re in luck! Yes, it is possible to download a large file from […]

It seems like a never ending battle for supremacy. Articles about Data Science being the bee’s knees, then more articles about how Data Engineering holds up the world of Data Science like Atlas. Whenever I read something in one of these two categories on Medium or wherever, it just seems more like ego clash to […]

Data gets bigger and teams want to process data faster, what else can you do? There is only so much code tweaking you can do, threads, processes, asyncio, it’s only going to get you so far. At some point you have terabytes of data to process, and it requires a decision about some sort of […]

Ever heard of something called a File Object in Python? Ever heard of BytesIO or StringIO? Your missing out. It’s easy, fast, and wonderful, in short, it’s the best. For some reason IO streams are a totally underused feature that rarely comes up in most code. We all know that memory if faster than disk […]

Concurrency in Python is like the awkward group of middleschool boys gathered in the corner of the dance floor all pointing to the girls in the other corner. Everyone talks a big game, pretending like they totally understand the other group and could easily handle the pickup if they wanted to. Mmmhmmm. When push comes […]

When building data pipelines all day long, every day, every year, ad infinitum, suprisingly I have managed learn some things. You see the same problems with data pipelines many times over. Years ago it was SSIS (I’m sorry you still have to use it, it just isn’t cool enough anymore), now if it’s not Streaming […]

Yeah, data engineering seems to be a hot topic today, as much as data science is/was 3 years ago. What does a data engineer do, what skills do you need? Peruse the job postings it will quickly become overwhelming. Spark, Hadoop, SQL, Python, Scala, ETL, Data Warehousing, various Data Sciencey Things, Streaming, Analytics, Business Intelligence, […]

So after watching way too many end of the world movies on Netflix I decided the best way to prepare for the Zombie Apocalypse would be to give myself a way to know when the dead are about to crash through my living room window (while I’m eating popcorn watching zombies on on Netflix of […]

I’ve been wanting to follow up on a post I did recently that was a quick intro to Apache Parquet, specifically when, where , and why to use it, maybe test some of its features, and what makes it a great alternative for flatfiles and csv files.

Columnstore indexes promise to be the savior of every data warehouse. So, what are they, when should you use them, when to stay away? Columnstore indexes are just what they sound like, data physically stored in a columnar way. This is what makes them so fast when it comes aggregating large amounts of data. The […]