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Is that really that bad of a problem? In the worst case, you use the underlying hooks to create a custom operator and in the worst worst case you do something l

Is that really that bad of a problem? In the worst case, you use the underlying hooks to create a custom operator and in the worst worst case you do something like have a Spark/Dataflow/k8s pod/whatever other single threaded or distributed task runner act as that custom operator. I'm running into the "incremental load" problem now trying to batch intervals of Avro files into BigQuery, but Airflow doesn't seem to complain much about 10 minute intervals (less than that and I'd be a bit worried). One workaround we're considering to having 144 dag runs/dag/day for 10 minute intervals is to just define it as a daily dag and periodically clear it throughout the day. I have heard of newer companies who don't need to deal with legacy ETL going the ELT route which is interesting to me. I'm curious who owns the transformation in that case. Do you just hire more data scientists or maybe a bunch of junior devs/analysts/DSs to own data cleaning and transformation? The way our transformation works is that the engineering team that owns the application data owns the transformation so they can document exactly what the data going into the BI tool is. It adds overhead on the engineering side, but not nearly as much as throwing the data in a lake and hoping someone downstream knows what to do with it.

Grimm1 5y ago
In a previous job we/I trained the analysts to be more technical and write the T part of ELT in DBT. They effectively became what is known as "Analytics Engineers" so they owned the T and then wrote their analysis on top of the models they had created.
- rockostrich 5y ago
  That works for ELT, especially if you have documentation around the raw data being loaded in but sounds like it adds a bit of overhead to the analysts' jobs which may or may not be more than just having the engineering team own it and document it well (something they already have to do for the analysts to write transformation code). I'm curious how you handle the upstream data schema changing. Loading in raw data means handling compatibility in another place outside the application.
  - KptMarchewa 5y ago
    In the end, analysts are cheaper than engineers.
    - rockostrich 5y ago
      Not if it's just a part of those engineers' jobs. They're already familiar with the underlying application data so owning the transformation is just understanding what the data needs to look like and documenting it. They're going to need to document the raw data anyway to avoid those analysts asking them a million questions. Might as well avoid hiring analysts who can also learn the transformation bit and just give them good data.
      - Grimm1 5y ago
        I think we've worked in very different jobs, in my case the analysts had a good idea of the underlying application data and often worked closely with both data engineering and regular engineering to understand it so they can make better analyses. They were quite competent in their own right, otherwise I wouldn't have given them control over the T which only made a net benefit to my life as reduced work.
      - dominotw 5y ago
        exactly. analysts are always a step behind engineers when it comes to really understand what data really means and what changes are coming down the line. this always results in delays, broken pipelines ect. modern tools like dbt make it easy for data producing teams to also own T part.
Arimbr 5y ago
Really good points! I don't think that Airflow is necessarily a problem if your data engineering team knows how to best use Airflow Operators, Hooks and DAGs for incremental loads. But because Airflow is not an opinionated ETL/ELT tool, most often I see a lot of custom code that could be improved... You know there is this "data mesh" hype now. I think the idea behind is to empower data consumers within the company (data analysts) who know best the data to create and maintain the models. That's easier said than done, and most often turns out into a worst situation than when is only data engineers who can model data... I've only heard of Zalando who has successfully distributed data ownership within the company.
- rockostrich 5y ago
  Yea, I wasn't familiar with Airbyte before writing that comment so now I'm seeing the value in it. We have tons of teams asking "how do I get this data into BigQuery" and the answer is usually "use this airflow operator to dump it into GCS and then use this airflow operator to load it into BigQuery" which isn't super useful for a non-technical person or even really any technical person not familiar with Airflow. A mesh is certainly something in-between a lake and a warehouse... Something super simple that I've gotten good feedback on so far from DSs is just documenting the transformed data in place. It was really difficult to do this in our old ETL stack (data pulled from HBase, transformed to parquet + Hive in HDFS) but we've moved a lot of it over to Avro files loaded into BigQuery where we can just put decorators on our Scala transformation code that's writing the Avro files and that updates the schema with descriptions in BigQuery. Gives a nice bit of ownership to the engineering team and lets the DS using the data be a lot more autonomous. That boundary has to exist somewhere (or I guess in many places for a "mesh") so having it distinctly at data getting loaded in feels right to me.
  - Arimbr 5y ago
    Nice work there! I also think that the next challenge for data teams is all this data documentation and discovery work. I still think that Airflow is great for power data engineers. Airbyte and dbt are positioned to empower data analysts (or lazy data engineers like me) to own the ELTs.

Grimm1 5y ago

In a previous job we/I trained the analysts to be more technical and write the T part of ELT in DBT. They effectively became what is known as "Analytics Engineers" so they owned the T and then wrote their analysis on top of the models they had created.

rockostrich 5y ago
That works for ELT, especially if you have documentation around the raw data being loaded in but sounds like it adds a bit of overhead to the analysts' jobs which may or may not be more than just having the engineering team own it and document it well (something they already have to do for the analysts to write transformation code). I'm curious how you handle the upstream data schema changing. Loading in raw data means handling compatibility in another place outside the application.
- KptMarchewa 5y ago
  In the end, analysts are cheaper than engineers.
  - rockostrich 5y ago
    Not if it's just a part of those engineers' jobs. They're already familiar with the underlying application data so owning the transformation is just understanding what the data needs to look like and documenting it. They're going to need to document the raw data anyway to avoid those analysts asking them a million questions. Might as well avoid hiring analysts who can also learn the transformation bit and just give them good data.
    - Grimm1 5y ago
      I think we've worked in very different jobs, in my case the analysts had a good idea of the underlying application data and often worked closely with both data engineering and regular engineering to understand it so they can make better analyses. They were quite competent in their own right, otherwise I wouldn't have given them control over the T which only made a net benefit to my life as reduced work.
    - dominotw 5y ago
      exactly. analysts are always a step behind engineers when it comes to really understand what data really means and what changes are coming down the line. this always results in delays, broken pipelines ect. modern tools like dbt make it easy for data producing teams to also own T part.

Arimbr 5y ago

Really good points! I don't think that Airflow is necessarily a problem if your data engineering team knows how to best use Airflow Operators, Hooks and DAGs for incremental loads. But because Airflow is not an opinionated ETL/ELT tool, most often I see a lot of custom code that could be improved... You know there is this "data mesh" hype now. I think the idea behind is to empower data consumers within the company (data analysts) who know best the data to create and maintain the models. That's easier said than done, and most often turns out into a worst situation than when is only data engineers who can model data... I've only heard of Zalando who has successfully distributed data ownership within the company.

rockostrich 5y ago
Yea, I wasn't familiar with Airbyte before writing that comment so now I'm seeing the value in it. We have tons of teams asking "how do I get this data into BigQuery" and the answer is usually "use this airflow operator to dump it into GCS and then use this airflow operator to load it into BigQuery" which isn't super useful for a non-technical person or even really any technical person not familiar with Airflow. A mesh is certainly something in-between a lake and a warehouse... Something super simple that I've gotten good feedback on so far from DSs is just documenting the transformed data in place. It was really difficult to do this in our old ETL stack (data pulled from HBase, transformed to parquet + Hive in HDFS) but we've moved a lot of it over to Avro files loaded into BigQuery where we can just put decorators on our Scala transformation code that's writing the Avro files and that updates the schema with descriptions in BigQuery. Gives a nice bit of ownership to the engineering team and lets the DS using the data be a lot more autonomous. That boundary has to exist somewhere (or I guess in many places for a "mesh") so having it distinctly at data getting loaded in feels right to me.
- Arimbr 5y ago
  Nice work there! I also think that the next challenge for data teams is all this data documentation and discovery work. I still think that Airflow is great for power data engineers. Airbyte and dbt are positioned to empower data analysts (or lazy data engineers like me) to own the ELTs.