Apache Beam and Apache Flink are open-source frameworks for parallel, distributed data processing at scale. Flink has DataStream and Table/SQL APIs and the former has more capacity to develop sophisticated data streaming applications. The DataStream API of PyFlink, Flink’s Python API, however, is not as complete as its Java counterpart, and it doesn’t provide enough capability to extend when there are missing features in Python. On the other hand, Apache Beam supports more possibility to extend and/or customise its features. In this series of posts, we discuss local development of Apache Beam pipelines using Python. In Part 1, a basic Beam pipeline is introduced, followed by demonstrating how to utilise Jupyter notebooks for interactive development. It also covers Beam SQL and Beam DataFrames examples on notebooks. In subsequent posts, we will discuss batch and streaming pipeline development and concludes with illustrating unit testing of existing pipelines.

In Part 5, we developed a dbt project that that targets Apache Iceberg where transformations are performed on Amazon Athena. Two dimension tables that keep product and user records are created as Type 2 slowly changing dimension (SCD Type 2) tables, and one transactional fact table is built to keep pizza orders. To improve query performance, the fact table is denormalized to pre-join records from the dimension tables using the array and struct data types. In this post, we discuss how to set up an ETL process on the project using Apache Airflow.

In Part 1 and Part 3, we developed data build tool (dbt) projects that target PostgreSQL and BigQuery using fictional pizza shop data. The data is modelled by SCD type 2 dimension tables and one transactional fact table. While the order records should be joined with dimension tables to get complete details for PostgreSQL, the fact table is denormalized using nested and repeated fields to improve query performance for BigQuery. Open Table Formats such as Apache Iceberg bring a new opportunity that implements data warehousing features in a data lake (i.e. data lakehouse) and Amazon Athena is probably the easiest way to perform such tasks on AWS. In this post, we create a new dbt project that targets Apache Iceberg where transformations are performed on Amazon Athena. Data modelling is similar to the BigQuery project where the dimension tables are modelled by the SCD type 2 approach and the fact table is denormalized using the array and struct data types.

In Part 3, we developed a dbt project that targets Google BigQuery with fictional pizza shop data. Two dimension tables that keep product and user records are created as Type 2 slowly changing dimension (SCD Type 2) tables, and one transactional fact table is built to keep pizza orders. The fact table is denormalized using nested and repeated fields for improving query performance. In this post, we discuss how to set up an ETL process on the project using Apache Airflow.

In this series, we discuss practical examples of data warehouse and lakehouse development where data transformation is performed by the data build tool (dbt) and ETL is managed by Apache Airflow. In Part 1, we developed a dbt project on PostgreSQL using fictional pizza shop data. At the end, the data sets are modelled by two SCD type 2 dimension tables and one transactional fact table. In this post, we create a new dbt project that targets Google BigQuery. While the dimension tables are kept by the same SCD type 2 approach, the fact table is denormalized using nested and repeated fields, which potentially can improve query performance by pre-joining corresponding dimension records.

In this series of posts, we discuss data warehouse/lakehouse examples using data build tool (dbt) including ETL orchestration with Apache Airflow. In Part 1, we developed a dbt project on PostgreSQL with fictional pizza shop data. Two dimension tables that keep product and user records are created as Type 2 slowly changing dimension (SCD Type 2) tables, and one transactional fact table is built to keep pizza orders. In this post, we discuss how to set up an ETL process on the project using Apache Airflow.

The data build tool (dbt) is a popular data transformation tool for data warehouse development. Moreover, it can be used for data lakehouse development thanks to open table formats such as Apache Iceberg, Apache Hudi and Delta Lake. dbt supports key AWS analytics services and I wrote a series of posts that discuss how to utilise dbt with Redshift, Glue, EMR on EC2, EMR on EKS, and Athena. Those posts focus on platform integration, however, they do not show realistic ETL scenarios. In this series of posts, we discuss practical data warehouse/lakehouse examples including ETL orchestration with Apache Airflow. As a starting point, we develop a dbt project on PostgreSQL using fictional pizza shop data in this post.

Kafka Connect is a tool for scalably and reliably streaming data between Apache Kafka and other systems. In this post, we discuss how to set up a data ingestion pipeline using Kafka connectors. Fake customer and order data is ingested into Kafka topics using the MSK Data Generator. Also, we use the Confluent S3 sink connector to save the messages of the topics into a S3 bucket. The Kafka Connect servers and individual connectors are deployed using the custom resources of Strimzi on Kubernetes.

Apache Kafka has five core APIs, and we can develop applications to send/read streams of data to/from topics in a Kafka cluster using the producer and consumer APIs. While the main Kafka project maintains only the Java APIs, there are several open source projects that provide the Kafka client APIs in Python. In this post, we discuss how to develop Kafka client applications using the kafka-python package on Kubernetes.

Apache Kafka is one of the key technologies for implementing data streaming architectures. Strimzi provides a way to run an Apache Kafka cluster and related resources on Kubernetes in various deployment configurations. In this series of posts, we will discuss how to create a Kafka cluster, to develop Kafka client applications in Python and to build a data pipeline using Kafka connectors on Kubernetes.