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Introduction to
Data Engineering

In this Introduction to Data Engineering module, we’ll describe the role of a data
engineer and motivate the claim why data engineering should be done in the Cloud.
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01 The Role of a Data Engineer

02 Data Engineering Challenges

03 Introduction to BigQuery

Module 04 Data Lakes and Data Warehouses

agenda 05 Transactional Databases Versus Data Warehouses

06 Partner Effectively with Other Data Teams

07 Manage Data Access and Governance

08 Build Production-ready Pipelines

09 Google Cloud Customer Case Study

A data engineer is someone who builds data pipelines, and so we’ll start by looking at
what this means -- what kinds of pipelines a data engineer builds and their purpose.

We’ll look at the challenges associated with the practice of data engineering and how
many of those challenges are easier to address when you build your data pipelines in
the cloud.

Next, we’ll introduce you to BigQuery, Google Cloud’s petabyte-scale serverless data
warehouse.

Having defined what data lakes and data warehouses are, we’ll then discuss these in
more detail.

Data Engineers may be responsible for both the backend transactional database
systems that support a company's applications and the data warehouses that support
their analytic workloads. In this lesson, we’ll explore the differences between
databases and data warehouses and the Google Cloud solutions for each of these
workloads.

Since a data warehouse also serves other teams, it is crucial to learn how to partner
effectively with them.

As part of being an effective partner, your engineering team will be asked to set up
data access policies and overall governance of how data is to be used and NOT used
by your users. We’ll discuss how to provide access to the data warehouse while
keeping to data governance best practices.

We’ll also discuss productionizing the whole operation and automating and monitoring
as much of it as possible.

Finally, we’ll look at a case study of how a Google Cloud customer solved a specific
business problem, before you complete a hands-on lab where you will use BigQuery
to analyze data.
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The Role of a Data

Engineer

01
Let’s start by exploring the role of a data engineer in a little more detail.
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A data engineer builds data pipelines to enable

data-driven decisions

Get the data to where it can be useful So… how do we get the
raw data from multiple
systems and where can
we store it durably?
Get the data into a usable condition

Add new value to the data

Manage the data

Productionize data processes

What does a data engineer do? A data engineer builds data pipelines.

Why does the data engineer build data pipelines? Because they want to get their data
into a place, such as a dashboard or report or machine learning model, from where
the business can make data-driven decisions.

The data has to be in a usable condition so that someone can use this data to make
decisions. Many times, the raw data is by itself not very useful.
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A data lake brings together data from across the

enterprise into a single location

Raw data

Replicate

RDBMS Offline files Other systems

and apps Data lake

Spreadsheets

One term you will hear a lot when you do data engineering is the concept of a data
lake.

A data lake brings together data from across the enterprise into a single location.

So, you might get the data from a relational database or from a spreadsheet, and
store the raw data in a data lake.

One option for this single location to store the raw data is to store it in a Cloud
Storage bucket.

What are the key considerations when deciding between data lake options? What do
you think?

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Key considerations when building a data lake

1. Can your data lake handle all the types of data

you have?

2. Can it scale to meet the demand? Replicate

3. Does it support high-throughput ingestion?

4. Is there fine-grained access control to objects?

Data lake
5. Can other tools connect easily?
We need an elastic data container
that is flexible and durable to
stage all our data …

There are some considerations that you need to keep in mind as you build a data
lake.

1. Does your data lake handle all the types of data you have? Can it all fit into a
cloud storage bucket? If you have a RDBMS, you might need to put the data
in Cloud SQL, a managed database, rather than cloud storage.
2. Can it elastically scale to meet the demand? As your data collected increases,
will you run out of disk space? This is more a problem with on-premises
systems than with cloud.
3. Does it support high-throughput ingestion? What is the network bandwidth?
Do you have edge points of presence?
4. Is there fine-grained access control to objects? Do users need to seek within a
file? Or is it enough to get a file as a whole? Cloud Storage is blob storage, so
you might need to think about the granularity of what you store.
5. Can other tools connect easily? How do they access the store? Don’t lose
sight of the fact that the purpose of a data lake is to make data accessible for
analytics.

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Cloud Storage is designed for 99.999999999%

annual durability

Replace/decommission Content storage

Backup infrastructure Analytics and ML and delivery

Quickly create buckets with Cloud Shell

gcloud storage buckets create gs://your-project-name

We mentioned our first Google Cloud product, the Cloud Storage bucket, which is a
good option for staging all of your raw data in one place before building
transformation pipelines into your data warehouse.

Why choose Google Cloud storage? Commonly, businesses use Cloud Storage as a
backup and archival utility for their businesses. Because of Google’s many data
center locations and high network availability, storing data in a Cloud Storage bucket
is durable and performant.

For a data engineer, you will often use a cloud storage bucket as part of your data
lake to store many different raw data files, such as CSV, JSON, or Avro. You could
then load or query them directly from BigQuery as a data warehouse.

Later in the course, you’ll create Cloud Shell buckets using the Cloud Console and
command line like you see here. Other Google Cloud products and services can
easily query and integrate with your bucket once you’ve got it setup and loaded with
data.
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What if your data is not usable in its original form?

SOME ETL Data processing

ASSEMBLY
REQUIRED

Dataproc Dataflow

Extract, Transform, and Load

Speaking of loading data, what if your raw data needs additional processing?

You may need to extract the data from its original location, transform it, and then load
it in.

One option is to carry out data processing. This is often done using Dataproc or
Dataflow. We’ll discuss using these products to carry out batch pipelines later in this
course.
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What if your data arrives continuously and endlessly?

THIS Streaming data processing

DATA
DOES NOT
WAIT

Pub/Sub Dataflow BigQuery

But what if batch pipelines are not enough? What if you need real-time analytics on
data that arrives continuously and endlessly?

In that case, you might receive the data in Pub/Sub, transform it using Dataflow and
stream it into BigQuery.

We’ll discuss streaming pipelines later in this course.

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Data Engineering

02
Challenges

Let's look at some of the challenges that a data engineer faces.

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Common challenges encountered by data engineers

Access to data Data accuracy Availability of Query

and quality computational performance
resources

As a data engineer, you will usually encounter a few problems when building data
pipelines.

You might find it difficult to access the data that you need. You might find that the
data, even after you access it, …doesn't have the quality that's required by the
analytics or machine learning model.

You plan to build a model, and even if the data quality exists, you might find that the
transformations require computational resources that might not be available to you.

And finally, you might run into challenges around query performance and being able
to run all of the queries and all of the transformations that you need with the
computational resources that you have.
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Challenge: Consolidating disparate datasets, data

formats, and manage access at scale

Access to data Data accuracy Availability of Query

and quality computational performance
resources

Let’s take the first challenge of consolidating disparate datasets, data formats, and
managing access at scale.
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Getting insights across multiple datasets is difficult

without a data lake

Data is scattered
across Google No common tool
Analytics 360, CRM, exists to analyze data
and Campaign and share results
Manager products, with the rest of the
among other sources. organization.

Customer and sales Some data is not in a

data is stored in a queryable format.
CRM system.

For example, you want to compute the customer acquisition cost: how much does it
cost in terms of marketing and promotions and discounts to acquire a customer?

That data might be scattered across a variety of marketing products and customer
relationship management software, … and finding a tool that can analyze all of this
data might be difficult because it might come from different organizations, different
tools, and different schemas, and maybe some of that data is not even structured.

So in order to find something as essential to your business as how much getting a

new customer costs, so that you can figure out what kind of discounts to offer to keep
them from turning, you can’t have your data exist in silos.
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Data is often siloed in many upstream source systems

Operational Refresh Ad hoc and Reporting

Systems Process Queries

Store User Queries

WEB

Set of Files
Catalog ETL DSS Database
TPC-DS

Inventory
Reports

Promotions

So what makes data access so difficult? Primarily, this is because data in many
businesses is siloed by departments and each department creates its own
transactional systems to support its own business processes.
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Data is often siloed in many upstream source systems

Operational Refresh Ad hoc and Reporting

Systems Process Queries

Store User Queries

WEB

Set of Files
Catalog ETL DSS Database
TPC-DS

Inventory
Reports

Promotions

So, for example, you might have operational systems that correspond to store
systems, have a different operational system maintained by your product warehouses
that manages your inventory, and have a marketing department that manages all the
promotions given that you need to do an analytics query on, such as, …
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Data is often siloed in many upstream source systems

Operational Refresh Ad hoc and Reporting

Example query: Systems Process Queries
Give me all the in-store
promotions for recent orders and
their inventory levels. Store User Queries

WEB

Set of Files
Catalog ETL DSS Database
TPC-DS

Inventory
Reports

Promotions

“Give me all the in-store promotions for recent orders and their inventory levels.”
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Data is often siloed in many upstream source systems

Operational Refresh Ad hoc and Reporting

Example query: Systems Process Queries
Give me all the in-store
promotions for recent orders and
their inventory levels. Store User Queries

WEB

Set of Files
Catalog ETL DSS Database
TPC-DS
Stored in a separate system
Inventory
and restricted access
Reports

Promotions

You need to know how to combine data from the stores, from the promotions, and
from the inventory levels, and because these are all stored in separate
systems—some of which have restricted access—building an analytic system that
uses all three of these data sets to answer an ad hoc query like this can be very
difficult.
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Challenge: Cleaning, formatting, and getting the data

ready for useful business insights in a data warehouse

Access to data Data accuracy Availability of Query

and quality computational performance
resources

The second challenge is that cleaning, formatting and getting the data ready for
insights requires you to build ETL pipelines.

ETL pipelines are usually necessary to ensure data accuracy and quality. The cleaned
and transformed data are typically stored, not in a data lake, but in a data warehouse.

A data warehouse is a consolidated place to store the data, and all the data are easily
joinable and queryable. Unlike a data lake, where the data is in the raw format, in the
data warehouse, the data is stored in a way that makes it efficient to query.
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Assume that any raw data from source systems needs to

be cleaned, transformed, and stored in a data warehouse
Operational Refresh Ad hoc and Reporting
Systems Process Queries

Store User Queries

WEB

Set of Files
Catalog ETL DSS Database
TPC-DS

Inventory
Reports

Promotions

Because data becomes useful only after you clean it up, you should assume that any
raw data that you collect from source systems needs to be cleaned and transformed.
And if you are transforming it, you might as well transform it into a format that makes it
efficient to query. In other words, ETL the data and store it in a data warehouse.

Let’s say you are a retailer and you have to consolidate data from multiple source
systems. Think about what the use case is.
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Assume that any raw data from source systems needs to

be cleaned, transformed, and stored in a data warehouse
Operational Refresh Ad hoc and Reporting
Systems Process Queries

Store User Queries

WEB
Query:
Give me the best performing Set of Files
Catalog ETL DSS Database
in-store promotions in France.
TPC-DS

Inventory
Reports

Promotions

Suppose the use case is to get the best performing in-store promotions in France.
You need to get the data from the stores and you have to get the data from the
promotions. But perhaps the store data is missing information.
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Assume that any raw data from source systems needs to

be cleaned, transformed, and stored in a data warehouse
Operational Refresh Ad hoc and Reporting
Systems Process Queries

Missing data and all User Queries

Store
timestamps stored as UTC

WEB
Query:
Give me the best performing Set of Files
Catalog ETL DSS Database
in-store promotions in France.
TPC-DS

Inventory
Reports

Promotions

Maybe some of the transactions are in cash, and for those, perhaps there is no
information on who the customer is; or some transactions might be spread over
multiple receipts, and you might need to combine those transactions because they
come from the same customer. Or perhaps the time stamps of the products are stored
in local time, whereas you have to spread across the globe, and so before you can do
anything, you need to convert everything into UTC.
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Assume that any raw data from source systems needs to

be cleaned, transformed, and stored in a data warehouse
Operational Refresh Ad hoc and Reporting
Systems Process Queries

Missing data and all User Queries

Store
timestamps stored as UTC

WEB
Query:
Give me the best performing Set of Files
Catalog ETL DSS Database
in-store promotions in France.
TPC-DS

Inventory
Reports
Promotion list stored as .csv
Promotions
files or manual spreadsheets

Similarly, the promotions may not be stored in the transaction database at all. They
might be just a text file that somebody loads on their web page, and it has a list of
codes that are used by the web application to apply discounts.

It can be extremely difficult to do a query like finding the best performing in-store
promotions because the data has so many problems. Whenever you have data like
this, you need to get the raw data and transform it into a form with which you can
actually carry out the necessary analysis.

It is obviously best if you can do this sort of cleanup and consolidation just once, and
store the resulting data to make further analysis easy. That’s the point of a data
warehouse.
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Challenge: Ensuring you have the compute capacity to

meet peak-demand for your team

Access to data Data accuracy Availability of Query

and quality computational performance
resources

If you need to do so much consolidation and cleanup, a common problem that arises
is where to carry out this compute. The availability of computation resources can be a
challenge.
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Challenge: Data Engineers need to manage server

and cluster capacity if using on-premise

Resources Under-provisioned
(Wasting time) On-premises
compute capacity

Under-utilized
Consumption (Wasting $$$)

Capacity

Time

If you are on an on-premises system, data engineers will need to manage server and
cluster capacity and make sure that enough capacity exists to carry out the ETL jobs.

The problem is that the compute needed by these ETL jobs is not constant over time.
Very often, it varies week to week, and depending on factors like holidays and
promotional sales. This means that when traffic is low, you are wasting money and
when traffic is high, your jobs are taking way too long.
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Challenge: Queries need to be optimized for

performance (caching, parallel execution)

Access to data Data accuracy Availability of Query

and quality computational performance
resources

Once your data is in your data warehouse, you need to optimize the queries your
users are running to make the most efficient use of your compute resources.
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Challenge: Managing query performance on-premise

comes with added overhead
● Choosing a query engine.

● Continually patching and updating query

Is there a better way
engine software.
to manage server
● Managing clusters and when to overhead so we can
re-cluster. focus on insights?

● Optimize for concurrent queries and

quota / demand between teams.

If you’re managing an on-premise data analytics cluster, you will be responsible for
choosing a query engine and installing the query engine software and keeping it up to
date as well as provisioning any more servers for additional capacity.

Isn’t there a better way to manage server overhead so we can focus on insights?
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03 Introduction to
BigQuery

There is a much better way to manage server overhead so we can focus on insights.
It is to use a serverless data warehouse.

BigQuery is Google Cloud’s petabyte-scale serverless data warehouse. You don’t

have to manage clusters. Just focus on insights.
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BigQuery is Google’s data warehouse solution

Data Tables and

Data mart Data lake Grants
warehouse views

BigQuery replaces BigQuery organizes BigQuery defines Function the same IAM grants
a typical data data tables into schemas and issues way as in a permission to
warehouse units called queries directly on traditional data perform specific
hardware setup. datasets. external data warehouse. actions.
sources.

The BigQuery service replaces the typical hardware setup for a traditional data
warehouse. That is, it serves as a collective home for all analytical data in an
organization.

Datasets are collections of tables that can be divided along business lines or a given
analytical domain. Each dataset is tied to a Google Cloud project.

A data lake might contain files in Cloud Storage or Google Drive or even transactional
data from Cloud Bigtable. BigQuery can define a schema and issue queries directly
on external data as federated data sources.

Database tables and views function the same way in BigQuery as they do in a
traditional data warehouse, allowing BigQuery to support queries written in a standard
SQL dialect which is ANSI: 2011 compliant.

Identity and Access Management is used to grant permission to perform specific

actions in BigQuery. This replaces the SQL GRANT and REVOKE statements that are
used to manage access permissions in traditional SQL databases.
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Cloud allows data engineers to spend less time managing

hardware and enabling scale. Let Google do that for you

Monitoring Insights Insights

Performance Resource
tuning provisioning

Utilization Handling
improvements growing scale

Deployment Reliability
& configuration

Typical Big Data Processing With Google

A key consideration behind agility is being able to do more with less, and it’s important
to make sure that you're not doing things that don’t add value.

If you do work that is common across multiple industries, it's probably not something
that your business wants to pay for.

The cloud lets you, the data engineer, spend less time managing hardware and more
time doing things that are much more customized and specific to the business.

You don’t have to be concerned about provisioning and reliability and utilization
improvements in performance or tuning on the cloud, so you can spend all your time
thinking about how to get better insights from your data.
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You don't need to provision resources before

using BigQuery

Resources On-demand storage

and compute

Consumption

Allocation

Time

You don't need to provision resources before using BigQuery, unlike many RDBMS
systems. BigQuery allocates storage and query resources dynamically based on your
usage patterns.

Storage resources are allocated as you consume them and deallocated as you
remove data or drop tables.

Query resources are allocated according to query type and complexity. Each query
uses some number of slots, which are units of computation that comprise a certain
amount of CPU and RAM.
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Data Lakes and Data

04
Warehouses

We’ve defined what a data lake is, and what a data warehouse is. Let’s look at these
in a bit more detail.
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A data engineer gets data into a useable condition

Get the data to where it can be useful

Get the data into a usable condition

Add new value to the data

Manage the data

Productionize data processes

Recall that we emphasized that the data has to be in a usable condition so that
someone can use this data to make decisions. Many times, the raw data is by itself
not very useful.
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A data warehouse stores transformed data in a usable

condition for business insights

Extract, Transform,
Replicate Load Pipeline

Raw data Data lake Data warehouse

What are the key considerations when

deciding between data warehouse options?

We said that raw data gets replicated and stored in a data lake. In order to make the
data usable, you will use Extract-Transform-Load or ETL pipelines to make the data
usable, and store this more usable data in a data warehouse.

Let’s consider what are the key considerations when deciding between data
warehouse options ...
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Considerations when choosing a data warehouse

● Can it serve as a sink for both batch and

streaming data pipelines?

● Can the data warehouse scale to meet my needs?

Extract, Transform,
● How is the data organized, cataloged, and access Load Pipeline
controlled?

● Is the warehouse designed for performance?

Data warehouse
● What level of maintenance is required by our
engineering team?

We need to ask ourselves these questions:

● The data warehouse is going to definitely serve as a sink — you’re going to

store data in it. But will it be fed by a batch pipeline or by a streaming pipeline?
Does the warehouse need to be accurate up-to-the-minute? Or is it enough to
load data into it once a day or once a week?
● Will the data warehouse scale to meet my needs? Many cluster-based data
warehouses will set per-cluster concurrent query limits. Will those query limits
cause a problem? Will the cluster size be large enough to store and traverse
your data?
● How is the data organized, cataloged, and access controlled? Will you be able
to share access to the data to all your stakeholders? What happens if they
want to query the data? Who will pay for the querying?
● Is the warehouse designed for performance? Again, carefully consider
concurrent query performance. And whether that performance comes out of
the box, or whether you need to go around creating indexes and tuning the
data warehouse.
● Finally, what level of maintenance is required by your engineering team?
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BigQuery is a modern data warehouse that changes

the conventional mode of data warehousing

Complex Restricted Optimized Optimized Needs continuous Needs multiple

Traditional ETL to only a for legacy for batch patching DBAs for
DW few users BI data and updates operational tasks

Automate Make Build the Tee up Fully Simplify

data insights foundation real-time managed data
BigQuery delivery accessible for AI insights operations

Traditional data warehouses are hard to manage and operate. They were designed
for a batch paradigm of data analytics and for operational reporting needs. The data in
the data warehouse was meant to be used by only a few management folks for
reporting purposes. BigQuery is a modern data warehouse that changes the
conventional mode of data warehousing. Here we can see some of the key
comparisons between a traditional data warehouse and BigQuery.

BigQuery provides mechanisms for automated data transfer and powers business
applications using technology that teams already know and use, so everyone has
access to data insights. You can create read-only shared data sources that both
internal and external users can query, and make query results accessible for anyone
through user-friendly tools such as Looker, Google Sheets, Tableau, or Google Data
Studio.

BigQuery lays the foundation for AI. It’s possible to train Tensorflow and Google Cloud
Machine Learning models directly with data sets stored in BigQuery, and BigQuery
ML can be used to build and train machine learning models with simple SQL. Another
extended capability is BigQuery GIS, which allows organizations to analyze
geographic data in BigQuery, essential to many critical business decisions that
revolve around location data.

BigQuery also allows organizations to analyze business events real-time, as they

unfold, by automatically ingesting data and making it immediately available to query in
their data warehouse. This is supported by the ability of BigQuery to ingest up to
100,000 rows of data per second and for petabytes of data to be queried at
lightning-fast speeds.

Due to Google’s fully managed, serverless infrastructure and globally available

network, BigQuery eliminates the work associated with provisioning and maintaining a
traditional data warehousing infrastructure.

BigQuery also simplifies data operations through the use of Identity and Access
Management to control user access to resources, creating roles and groups and
assigning permissions for running jobs and queries in a project, and also providing
automatic data backup and replications.
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You can simplify Data Warehouse ETL pipelines with

external connections to Cloud Storage and Cloud SQL

Postgres Federated query

MySQL
Cloud SQL

Cloud Storage

Even though we talked about getting data into BigQuery by running ETL pipelines,
there is another option.

That is to treat BigQuery as a query engine and allow it to query the data in-place. For
example, you can use BigQuery to directly query database data in Cloud SQL — that
is, managed relational databases like PostgreSQL and MySQ.

You can also use BigQuery to directly query files on Cloud Storage as long as these
files are in formats like CSV or Parquet.

The real power comes when you can leave your data in place and still join it against
other data in the data warehouse.

Let’s take a look.

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Transactional
Databases Versus

05
Data Warehouses

Data engineers may be responsible for both the back end transactional database
systems that support your company's applications AND the data warehouses that
support your analytic workloads. In this lesson, you’ll explore the differences between
databases and data warehouses and the Google Cloud solutions for each workload.
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Cloud SQL is fully managed SQL Server, Postgres, or MySQL

for your Relational Database (transactional RDBMS)

● Automatic encryption
Cloud SQL
● 64 TB storage capacity

● 60,000 IOPS (read/write per second)

● Auto-scale and auto backup

Why not simply use Cloud SQL

for reporting workflows?

If you have SQL Server, MySQL, or PostgreSQL as your relational database, you can
migrate it to Cloud SQL which is Google Cloud’s fully managed relational database
solution.

Cloud SQL delivers high performance and scalability with up to 64 terabytes of

storage capacity, 60,000 IOPS, and 624 gigabytes of RAM per instance. You can take
advantage of storage auto-scale to handle growing database needs with zero
downtime.

One question you might get asked is: “Why not use simply use Cloud SQL for
reporting workflows? You can run SQL directly on the database right?”

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RDBMS are optimized for data from a single source and

high-throughput writes versus high-read data warehouses

You will likely need and

encounter both a database
and data warehouse in your
Cloud SQL * BigQuery final architecture.

● Scales to GB and TB. ● Scales to PB.

● Ideal for back-end database ● Easily connect to external
applications. data sources for ingestion.
● Record-based storage. ● Column-based storage. * Cloud SQL is one of several
RDBMS options on Google Cloud

This is a great question and will be answered in greater detail in the Building a Data
Warehouse module. Google Cloud has several options for RDBMS’s including
Spanner and Cloud SQL.

When considering Cloud SQL, be aware that Cloud SQL is optimized to be a

database for transactions (or writes) and BigQuery is a data warehouse optimized for
reporting workloads (mostly reads).

The fundamental architecture of these data storage options is quite different. Cloud
SQL databases are RECORD-based storage -- meaning the entire record must be
opened on disk, even if you just selected a single column in your query.

BigQuery is COLUMN-based storage, which as you might guess, allows for really
wide reporting schemas since you can simply read individual columns out from disk.
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Relational database management systems (RDBMS) are

critical for managing new transactions
Operational Systems

Store

RDBMS are optimized for high WEB

throughput WRITES to RECORDS.
Catalog

Inventory

Promotions

This isn’t to say RDBMS’ aren’t as performant as Data Warehouses -- they serve two
different purposes. RDBMS helps your business manage new transactions.

Take this point-of-sale terminal at a storefront. Each order and product is likely written
out as new records in a relational database somewhere. This database may store all
of the orders received from their website, all of the products listed in the catalog, or
the number of items in their inventory.

This is so that when an existing order is changed, it can be quickly updated in the
database. Transactional systems allow for a single row in a database table to be
modified in a consistent way. They also are built on certain relational database
principles, like referential integrity, to guard against cases like a customer ordering a
product that doesn’t exist in the product table.

So where does all this raw data end up in our data lake and data warehouse
discussion? What’s the complete picture?
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The complete picture: Source data comes into the data

lake, is processed into the data warehouse and made
available for insights
Operational systems
eline
e pip
tur ML model
Store Fea

WEB
Eng pipeline

Catalog
Other team data
warehouse
Data lake Data warehouse BI p
Inventory ipe
line

Promotions

Who leads these other teams that Reporting

dashboards
we will have to partner with?

Here it is. Our operational systems, like our relational databases that store online
orders, inventory, and promotions, are our raw data sources on the left. Note that this
isn’t exhaustive -- you could have other source systems that are manual like CSV files
or spreadsheets too.

These upstream data sources get gathered together in a single consolidated location
in our data lake which is designed for durability and high availability.

Once in the data lake, the data often needs to be processed via transformations that
then output the data into our data warehouse where it is ready for use by
downstream teams.

Here are three quick examples of other teams that often build pipelines on our data
warehouse:

● An ML team may build a pipeline to get features for their models, …

● An engineering team may be using our data as part of their data warehouse,
…
● And a BI team may want to build dashboards using some of our data.

So who works on these teams and how do they partner with our data engineering
team?
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Partner Effectively

06
with Other Data Teams

Since a data warehouse also serves other teams, it is crucial to learn how to partner
effectively with them.
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A data engineer builds data pipelines to enable

data-driven decisions

Get the data to where it can be useful

Get the data into a usable condition

Add new value to the data What teams rely on

these pipelines?

Manage the data

Productionize data processes

Remember that once you’ve got data where it can be useful and it’s in a usable
condition we need to add new value to the data through analytics and machine
learning. What teams might rely on our data?
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Many teams rely on partnerships with data engineering

to get value out of their data
How might each of these teams rely on data engineering?

ML Engineer Data Analyst Data Engineer

There are many data teams that rely on your data warehouse and partnerships with
data engineering to build and maintain new data pipelines.

The three most common clients are:

● The machine learning engineer
● The data or BI analyst, and
● Other data engineers

Let’s examine how each of these roles interacts with your new data warehouse and
how data engineers can best partner with them.
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Machine learning teams need data engineers to help

them capture new features in a stable pipeline

Feature pipeline
ML model
Raw data Data lake Data warehouse

As you’ll see in our course on machine learning, an ML team’s models rely on having
lots of high quality input data to create, train, test, evaluate, and serve their models.
They will often partner with data engineering teams to build pipelines and datasets for
use in their models.

Two common questions you may get asked are …

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Machine learning teams need data engineers to help

them capture new features in a stable pipeline

“Are all of these

features available at
production time?”

Feature pipeline
ML model
Raw data Data lake Data warehouse

“How long does it take for a transaction to make it from raw data all the way into the
data warehouse”? They’re asking this because any data that they train their models
on must also be available at prediction-time as well. If there is a long delay in
collecting and aggregating the raw data it will impact the ML team’s ability to create
useful models.
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Machine learning teams need data engineers to help

them capture new features in a stable pipeline

“Are all of these

features available at
production time?”

Feature pipeline
ML model
Raw data Data lake Data warehouse

“Can you help us get more features (columns)

of data for our machine learning model?”

A second question that you will definitely get asked is how difficult it would be to add
more columns or rows of data into certain datasets. Again, the ML team relies on
teasing out relationships between the columns of data and having a rich history to
train models on. You will earn the trust of your partner ML teams by making your
datasets easily discoverable, documented, and available to ML teams to experiment
on quickly.
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Add value: Machine learning directly in BigQuery

FROM
ML.EVALUATE(MODEL
`bqml_tutorial.sample_model`,
TABLE eval_table)

1 Dataset 2 Create/train 3 Evaluate 4 Predict/classify

CREATE MODEL FROM

`bqml_tutorial.sample_model` ML.PREDICT(MODEL
OPTIONS(model_type='logistic_reg') AS `bqml_tutorial.sample_model`,
SELECT table game_to_predict) )
AS predict

A unique feature of BigQuery is that you can create high-performing machine learning
models directly in BigQuery using just SQL by using Bigquery ML. Here is the actual
model code to CREATE a model, EVALUATE it, and then MAKE predictions. You’ll
see this again in our lectures on machine learning later on.
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Data analysis and business intelligence teams rely on

data engineering to showcase the latest insights

“What data is available

in your warehouse for
us to access?”

BI pipeline
Reporting
Raw data Data lake Data warehouse dashboards

“Our dashboards are slow, can you help us

re-engineer our BI tables for better performance?”

Other critical stakeholders are your business intelligence and data analyst teams that
rely on good clean data to query for insights and build dashboards.

These teams need datasets that have clearly defined schema definitions, the ability to
quickly preview rows, and the performance to scale to many concurrent dashboard
users.
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Add value: BI Engine for dashboard performance

Looker
● No need to manage OLAP cubes or BigQuery Studio
BI Engine
separate BI servers for dashboard Batch or Sheets
Streaming
performance. Partner
BI tools
● Natively integrates with BigQuery
streaming for real-time data refresh.

● Column oriented in-memory BI

execution engine.

One of the Google Cloud products that helps manage the performance of dashboards
is BigQuery BI Engine. BI Engine is a fast, in-memory analysis service that is built
directly into BigQuery and available to speed up your business intelligence
applications.

Historically, BI teams would have to build, manage, and optimize their own BI servers
and OLAP cubes to support reporting applications. Now, with BI Engine, you can get
sub-second query response time on your BigQuery datasets without having to create
your own cubes. BI Engine is built on top of the same BigQuery storage and compute
architecture and servers as a fast in-memory intelligent caching service that maintains
state.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqlrIcmqPgo
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Other data engineering teams may rely on your pipelines

being timely and error free

“How can we both

ensure dataset uptime
and performance?”

Pipeline
Other team
Raw data Data lake Data warehouse data warehouse

“We’re noticing high demand for your datasets -- be

sure your warehouse can scale for many users.”

One last group of stakeholders are other data engineers that rely on the uptime and
performance of your data warehouse and pipelines for their downstream data lakes
and data warehouses.

They will often ask “How can you ensure that the data pipeline we depend on will
always be available when we need it?”

Or, “We are noticing high demand for certain really popular datasets. How can you
monitor and scale the health of your entire data ecosystem?”
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Add value: Cloud Monitoring for performance

● View in-flight and

completed queries.
● Create alerts and
send notifications.
● Track spending on
BigQuery resources.
● Use Cloud Audit Logs
to view actual job
information (who
executed, what query
was ran).

● One popular way is to use the built-in Cloud Monitoring of all resources on
Google Cloud.
● Since Google Cloud Storage and BigQuery are resources, you can set up
alerts and notifications for metrics like “Statement Scanned Bytes” or “Query
Count” so you can better track usage and performance.
● Here are two other reasons why Cloud Monitoring is used. One Is for tracking
spending of all the different resources used and two is for what the billing
trends are for your team or organization.
● And lastly, you can use the Cloud Audit Logs to view actual query job
information to see granular level details about which queries were executed
and by whom. This is useful if you have sensitive datasets that you need to
monitor closely. A topic we will discuss more next.

https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/monitoring
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Manage Data Access

07
and Governance

As part of being an effective partner, your engineering team will be asked to set up
data access policies and overall governance of how data is to be used and NOT used
by your users.
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A data engineer manages data access and governance

Get the data to where it can be useful

Get the data into a usable condition

Add new value to the data

Manage the data

Productionize data processes

This is what we mean when we say a data engineer must manage the data. This
includes critical topics, such as privacy and security. What are some key
considerations when managing certain datasets?
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Data engineering must set and communicate a

responsible data governance model
line
ipe
ep
tur
ML model
Fea

Eng pipeline

Other team data

warehouse
BI
pip
Raw data Data lake Data warehouse e line

Reporting
dashboards
Who should have access?

How is PII handled?

How can we educate end-users on our data catalog?

Clearly communicating a data governance model for:

● Who should and should not have access?
● How is Personally Identifiable Information (like phone numbers or email
addresses) handled?
● And even more basic tasks like how will our end users discover the different
datasets we have for analysis?
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Cloud Data Catalog is a managed data discovery + Data

Loss Prevention API for guarding PII

Data Catalog

Simplify data discovery at any scale:

BigQuery Search DLP Fully managed metadata management service
with no infrastructure to set up or manage.

Unified view of all datasets:

Central and secure data catalog across Google
Pub/Sub Data Cloud with metadata capture and tagging.
Catalog

Data governance foundation:

Security compliance with access level controls
along with Cloud Data Loss Prevention
Cloud
integration for handling sensitive data.
Storage

One solution for data governance is the Cloud Data Catalog and the Data Loss
Prevention API.

● The Data Catalog makes all the metadata about your datasets available to
search for your users. You group datasets together with tags, flag certain
columns as sensitive, etc.
● Why is this useful? If you have many different datasets with many different
tables -- which different users have different access levels to -- the Data
Catalog provides a single unified user experience for discovering those
datasets quickly. No more hunting for specific table names in SQL first.
● Often used in conjunction with Data Catalog is the Cloud Data Loss
Prevention API, or DLP API, which helps you better understand and manage
sensitive data. It provides fast, scalable classification and redaction for
sensitive data elements like credit card numbers, names, social security
numbers, US and selected international identifier numbers, phone numbers,
and Google Cloud credentials.
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Build

08
Production-ready
Pipelines

Once your data lakes and data warehouses are set up and your governance policy is
in place, it’s time to productionalize the whole operation and automate and monitor as
much of it as we can.
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A data engineer builds production data pipelines to

enable data-driven decisions

Get the data to where it can be useful

Get the data into a usable condition

Add new value to the data

Manage the data

Productionize data processes

That’s what we mean when we say productionalize the data process. It has to be an
end-to-end and scalable data processing system.
 Proprietary + Confidential

Data engineering owns the health and future

of their production data pipelines
line
ipe
ep ML model
tur
Fea

Eng pipeline
Other team data
warehouse
BI
pip
Raw data Data lake Data warehouse eline

Reporting
dashboards
How can we ensure pipeline health and data cleanliness?

How do we productionalize these pipelines to minimize maintenance and maximize uptime?

How do we respond and adapt to changing schemas and business needs?

Are we using the latest data engineering tools and best practices?

Your data engineering team is responsible for the health of the plumbing -- that is the
pipelines -- and ensuring that the data is available and up-to-date for analytic and ML
workloads.

Common questions that you should ask at this phase are:

● How can we ensure pipeline health and data cleanliness?
● How do we productionalize these pipelines to minimize maintenance and
maximize uptime?
● How do we respond and adapt to changing schemas and business needs?
● And are we using the latest data engineering tools and best practices?
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Cloud Composer (managed Apache Airflow) is used to

orchestrate production workflows
Customer web application
Model Training
Web server Cloud Machine
Learning

Database server
Rec API ML Data
Application server
App Engine Cloud Storage

Cloud Endpoints Training and Model Files

Orchestration Google Analytics

Cloud Composer BigQuery

Mobile/Tablet Browser Client

Client Google
Analytics 360

One common workflow orchestration tool used by enterprises is Apache Airflow.

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Cloud Composer (managed Apache Airflow) is used to

orchestrate production workflows
Customer web application
Model Training
Web server Cloud Machine
Learning

Database server
Rec API ML Data
Application server
App Engine Cloud Storage

Cloud Endpoints Training and Model Files

Orchestration Google Analytics

Cloud Composer BigQuery

Mobile/Tablet Browser Client

Client Google
Analytics 360

Google Cloud has a fully-managed version of Airflow called Cloud Composer.

Cloud Composer helps your data engineering team orchestrate all the pieces to the
data engineering puzzle that we have discussed so far (and even more that you
haven’t come across yet!).

For example, when a new CSV file gets dropped into Cloud Storage, you can
automatically have that trigger an event that kicks off a data processing workflow and
puts that data directly into your data warehouse.

The power of this tool comes from the fact that Google Cloud big data products and
services have API endpoints that you can call.

A Cloud Composer job can then run every night or every hour and kick-off your entire
pipeline from raw data, to the data lake, and into the data warehouse for you.

We’ll discuss workflow orchestration in greater detail in later modules and you’ll do a
lab on Cloud Composer as well.
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09 Google Cloud
Customer Case Study

We have looked at a lot of different aspects of what a data engineer has to do. Let’s
look at a case study of how a Google Cloud customer solves a specific business
problem. That will help tie all these different aspects together.
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Twitter democratized data analysis using BigQuery

“We believe that users with a wide range of technical skills should be able to discover data
and have access to SQL-based analysis and visualization tools that perform well”
-- Twitter

Cloud
BigQuery
Storage

BigQuery
blaster Airflow

Cloud
Replicator

Google Data
Studio
Vertica HDFS

Twitter has large amounts of data, and they also have high-powered sales teams and
marketing teams, which for a long time did not have access to the data and couldn’t
use that data for carrying out the analysis that they wanted to be able to do.

Much of the data was stored on Hadoop clusters that were completely over-taxed. So
Twitter replicated some of that data from HDFS on to Cloud Storage, loaded it into
BigQuery, and provided BigQuery to the rest of the organization. These were some of
the most frequently requested data sets within Twitter, and they discovered that, with
ready access to the data, many people who were not data analysts are now analyzing
data and making better decisions as a result.

For more information, a link to the blog post is available in the PDF version of this
content under Course Resources.

https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastructure/2019/democratizing-da
ta-analysis-with-google-bigquery.html
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Recap

● Data sources

● Data lakes

● Data warehouses

● Google Cloud solutions for Data Engineering

Let’s summarize the major topics we covered so far in this introduction.

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Concept review
Sources Stream processing Refined data

Real-time store
Pub/Sub Dataflow
Cloud
Bigtable
Sensors Journal
Data sources feed ML (training) Cloud
Spanner

into a Data Lake and Data lake Notebooks

ML (prediction)
are processed into On-premises Cloud
Storage Vertex AI Cloud
your Data Warehouse Batch Bigtable

for analysis. Transfer Data stores

User activity Appliance Data mining and exploration
Data warehouse
Transfer
Service Notebooks
BigQuery
gcloud
OLTP storage Dataprep
Hive, Spark, etc.

Dataproc

Cloud
Storage

● Recall that your data sources are your upstream systems like RDBMS’ and
other raw data that comes from your business in different formats.
● Data lakes -- your consolidated location for raw data that is durable and highly
available. In this example our data lake is Cloud Storage.
● And data warehouses which are the end result of preprocessing the raw data
in your data lake and getting it ready for analytic and ML workloads.

You’ll notice a lot of other Google Cloud product icons here like batch and streaming
data into your lake and running ML on your data. We’ll cover those topics in detail
later in this course.
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Here’s a useful guide for

“Google Cloud products in
4 words or less”

The Google Cloud Developer's Cheat Sheet

Updated continually by Google Developer Relations

A useful cheatsheet to bookmark as a reference is the “Google Cloud Products in 4

words or less” which is actively maintained on GitHub by our Google Developer
Relations team. It’s also a great way to stay on top of new products and services that
come out just by following the GitHub commits!

https://github.com/priyankavergadia/google-cloud-4-words

https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/developers-practitioners/back-popular-demand-g
oogle-cloud-products-4-words-or-less-2022-edition
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Lab Intro
Using BigQuery to do Analysis

Now it's time to practice analyzing data with BigQuery in your lab. In this lab, you will
execute interactive queries in the BigQuery console, and then combine and run
analytics on multiple datasets.