Data Engineering Tools in 2023

Best Data Engineering Tools

In this comprehensive guide, we delve into the realm of data engineering and present an array of top-notch data tools tailored to diverse use cases. Our analysis spans four key categories, each optimized for specific functions:

1. Data Manipulation and Transformation
2. Data Storage Solutions
3. Data Processing and Pipeline Development
4. Machine Learning Engineering

Now let’s delve even deeper into each category and explore the tools available for various data engineering use cases.

Data manipulation and transformation tools

• Apache NiFi – a data integration tool that automates system data flows. It provides a web-based graphical user interface for designing and managing data pipelines, making it easy to build complex data processing workflows. NiFi is known for its data lineage and provenance tracking, which helps in understanding how data flows through the system. 

Key Features:

1. Visual data flow design: Apache NiFi’s drag-and-drop interface allows users to design data flows intuitively, making it easy to create and manage data transformations without writing complex code.
2. Data provenance: NiFi provides end-to-end data lineage and tracking, enabling users to monitor data flow, detect bottlenecks, and ensure data quality throughout the transformation process.
3. Extensive processor library: NiFi offers a wide range of processors for data enrichment, filtering, aggregation, and more, empowering data engineers to perform various data transformations effortlessly.

How It’s Useful:

Apache NiFi simplifies data transformations, making it an ideal tool for data engineers to process, enrich, and cleanse data efficiently, ensuring data accuracy and reliability.

• Pandas is a Python library widely used for data manipulation and analysis. It provides data structures like DataFrame, which allows users to perform various operations like filtering, grouping, aggregating, and merging data efficiently. Pandas are especially useful when dealing with structured data and are often used in conjunction with other data-processing libraries.

Key Features:

1. DataFrame data structure: Pandas provides the DataFrame data structure, a two-dimensional, size-mutable, and flexible data container, similar to a spreadsheet or SQL table.
2. Data manipulation functions: Pandas offers a wide range of functions for filtering, grouping, aggregating, pivoting, and merging data, making it easy to clean and transform data.
3. Handling missing data: Pandas provides methods to handle missing data by filling or dropping missing values, which is crucial for data cleaning and preprocessing.
4. Time series data support: Pandas has excellent support for working with time series data, including date/time parsing, resampling, and rolling window calculations.

How it’s useful:

The various data manipulation functions simplify common data cleaning and transformation operations, saving time and effort. Pandas’ ability to handle missing data ensures data integrity during preprocessing, enabling accurate analysis and modeling. Moreover, its support for time series data makes it a valuable tool for analyzing temporal data and performing time-based calculations.

Data storage solutions tools

• Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is a scalable and secure object storage service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It allows users to store and retrieve vast amounts of data with high durability and availability. S3 is widely used for data storage in cloud-based data pipelines and can seamlessly integrate with other AWS services.

Key Features:

1. Amazon S3 allows users to store and retrieve vast amounts of data securely, with virtually unlimited scalability to accommodate growing data requirements.
2. Data lifecycle management: S3 provides customizable lifecycle policies, enabling users to automatically transition data to different storage tiers based on usage patterns and cost optimization.
3. Data encryption: S3 offers robust encryption options to protect data at rest and during transit, ensuring data security and compliance.

How It’s Useful:

Amazon S3 provides a reliable and cost-effective data storage solution, empowering data engineers to store and manage data efficiently, and supporting seamless data access for analytics and other applications.

• HDFS is the primary storage system used by Hadoop, designed to handle large datasets across multiple nodes in a distributed computing environment. HDFS offers fault tolerance, high throughput, and data locality, making it suitable for big data applications. It is commonly used in on-premise or hybrid cloud environments.

Key Features:

1. Distributed storage: HDFS distributes data across multiple nodes in a Hadoop cluster, ensuring fault tolerance and high availability.
2. Scalability: HDFS can scale horizontally to handle massive amounts of data by adding more nodes to the cluster.
3. Data replication: HDFS replicates data blocks to multiple nodes, reducing the risk of data loss and improving data reliability.
4. High throughput: HDFS is optimized for sequential read and write operations, making it well-suited for large-scale batch processing.
5. Data locality: HDFS places data closer to the processing nodes, reducing network congestion and improving data processing efficiency.

Data processing and pipeline development tools

• Apache Spark – is a fast and powerful open-source data processing engine that provides an easy-to-use API for distributed data processing. It supports various data formats and can handle large-scale data processing tasks efficiently.

Key Features:

1. In-memory data processing: Apache Spark’s lightning-fast processing engine allows users to analyze and manipulate data in real-time, enhancing efficiency and reducing processing time significantly.
2. Distributed computing: Spark’s ability to distribute data processing across multiple nodes ensures scalability and handles massive datasets without compromising performance.
3. Flexible data source integration: Spark supports various data sources, including Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), cloud storage, and relational databases, making it a versatile choice for data pipeline building.

How It’s Useful:

Apache Spark simplifies complex data processing tasks, enabling data engineers to build robust and scalable data pipelines for both batch and real-time data processing scenarios.

• Apache Airflow is an open-source platform to programmatically author, schedule, and monitor workflows. It allows users to define complex workflows as code using Python, making it flexible and customizable.

Key Features:

1. Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) based workflows: Airflow represents data pipelines as DAGs, making it easy to define dependencies between tasks and manage complex workflows.
2. Dynamic task generation: Airflow supports dynamic task generation, enabling users to create tasks programmatically based on the data or conditions at runtime.
3. Extensibility through custom operators and plugins: Airflow allows users to define custom operators and plugins, making it highly adaptable to various data processing needs.
4. Scheduling and monitoring: Airflow provides robust scheduling capabilities to manage the execution of tasks and a web-based UI for monitoring and tracking workflow progress.

How it’s Useful:

Apache Airflow is a powerful tool for workflow coordination and automation. Its DAG-based approach allows users to create complex workflows with dependencies between tasks, making it easier to manage data processing pipelines. The dynamic task generation feature enhances flexibility, enabling users to create tasks based on runtime conditions or dynamically generated data. Airflow’s extensibility through custom operators and plugins allows users to integrate with different data sources and tools seamlessly. Its scheduling and monitoring capabilities provide visibility into workflow progress and ensure that data processing tasks are executed efficiently.

Machine Learning Engineering tools

• TensorFlow Extended (TFX) is an end-to-end platform for deploying production machine learning models. It is an open-source framework developed by Google that extends TensorFlow’s capabilities to support the entire machine learning workflow, from data preprocessing to model serving.

Key Features:

1. End-to-end ML pipeline orchestration: TFX simplifies the process of building, training, and deploying machine learning models at scale, ensuring a smooth transition from development to production.
2. Model validation and monitoring: TFX offers built-in tools for model validation and monitoring, allowing data engineers to ensure model accuracy and detect performance degradation over time.
3. Integration with TensorFlow: TFX seamlessly integrates with TensorFlow, making it easy for data engineers to leverage TensorFlow’s extensive ecosystem for model development and experimentation.

How It’s Useful:

TFX streamlines the machine learning engineering process, enabling data engineers to operationalize ML models efficiently and deploy them to production for real-world use cases.

Expert opinion: Christopher Garzon  

While DBT is still new, it is one of the fastest growing tools in the industry due to its ease of use for analysts and its integration with Airflow (another integral tool for data engineers to know), we highly recommend learning DBT. It is already used at most big tech companies and it’s allowing analysts and junior engineers to play a big role in the ETL processes of companies pipelines. 

FAQs on Data Engineering Tools

Question: Can data engineering tools in 2023 handle both structured and unstructured data?

Answer: Yes, many modern data engineering tools have evolved to handle both structured and unstructured data. They can extract valuable information from various sources, such as databases, files, APIs, and even unstructured sources like social media feeds and images.

Question: What is Apache NiFi?

Answer: Apache NiFi is an open-source data integration platform that allows users to automate the flow of data between systems. It provides a graphical user interface (GUI) to design data pipelines, making it easy to ingest, route, transform, and process data from various sources to different destinations.

Question: Can Apache NiFi integrate with other data processing tools?

Answer: Yes, Apache NiFi can seamlessly integrate with other data processing tools like Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, Hadoop, and more, allowing users to create end-to-end data pipelines.

Question: How do Pandas differ from NumPy?

Answer: While NumPy provides support for multi-dimensional arrays, Pandas introduces higher-level data structures like DataFrames that are designed for more complex data manipulation and analysis tasks.

Question: What are the main use cases for Amazon S3?

Answer: Amazon S3 is commonly used for data backup and archiving, hosting static websites, serving as a content delivery network (CDN), storing and sharing large media files, and as a data lake for big data analytics.

Question: How does Apache Spark achieve faster data processing?

Answer: Spark uses in-memory processing, caching, and a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) execution model to minimize data shuffling and optimize data processing, resulting in faster performance.

Conclusion

In the ever-evolving landscape of data engineering, the right tools can make a significant difference in efficiency, reliability, and scalability.

The top 10 tools mentioned in this article represent a diverse set of technologies that cover critical aspects of data engineering, from data processing and orchestration to integration and version control.

By incorporating these tools into their workflows, data engineers can enhance productivity, tackle complex challenges, and deliver high-quality data solutions to drive business success.
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Chris Garzon

Christopher Garzon has worked as a data engineer for Amazon, Lyft, and an asset management start up where he was responsible for building the entire Data Infrastructure from scratch. He is the author “Ace the Data Engineer Interview” and has helped 100’s of students break into the data engineer industry. He is also an angel investor, an advisor to multiple to multiple start ups, and the founder and CEO of Data Engineer Academy.