Data engineering is a set of operations aimed at creating interfaces and mechanisms for the flow and access of information. It takes dedicated specialists – data engineers – to maintain data so that it remains available and usable by others. In short, data engineers set up and operate the organization’s data infrastructure preparing it for further analysis by data analysts and scientists.

To understand data engineering in simple terms, let’s turn to databases – collections of consistent and accessible information. Within a large organization, there are usually many different types of operations management software: ERP, CRM, production systems, and more. And so there are many different databases as well.

It’s necessary to figure out how to get sales data from its dedicated database talk with inventory records kept in a SQL server, for instance. This creates the necessity for integrating data in a unified storage system where data is collected, reformatted, and ready for use – a data warehouse. Now, data scientists and business intelligence (BI) engineers can connect to the warehouse, access the needed data in the needed format, and start yielding valuable insights from it.