In this blog, we provide a comprehensive exploration of the key differences between data engineering, data science, and data analysis. You’ll gain a deeper understanding of each role’s definition, overview, and the crucial role of data integration within them.
What is Data Engineering?
Data engineering involves the design, construction, and maintenance of data pipelines and infrastructure. Professionals in this role focus on building robust systems that collect, store, massage, clean and process data efficiently which can they be used by other teams and processes/systems. They work with databases, ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tools, and programming languages to ensure data availability and accessibility.
- Data engineers are responsible for building and maintaining the data infrastructure and pipelines that collect, process, and store data.
- Key skills include programming, database management, ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) processes, data warehousing, and working with big data tools like Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark.
- Common tools used by data engineers include SQL, Python, Java, Apache Kafka, and cloud platforms like AWS and Azure.
Tools Generally Used
There are various ETL and Data Engineering tools, both in open source domain and proprietary domain which are present which can be used.
AI Tools with Data Engineering Capabilities
There are tools like Ask On Data coming into picture which are powered by AI, ML and NLP models. Traditionally data engineering has been purely a technical work involving the dependence of Data Engineers. But tools like Ask On Data is bringing a chat kind of interface, hence allowing anybody (whether technical or non technical) to type and create required data pipelines.
What is Data Science?
Data science revolves around extracting insights, prediction, forecastingetc from data using statistical analysis, machine learning, and data modeling techniques. Data scientists leverage statistical algorithms and programming skills to uncover hidden patterns, trends, and correlations in data.
Tools used: Tools mainly used are tools like scikit, Python, R, Tensorflow etc.
What is Data Analysis?
Data analysis involves examining data sets to identify trends, draw conclusions, and support decision-making processes. Data analysis mainly happens on historical data and can answer only historical questions like why it happened, when it happened, how it happened but it will not be able to answer when it might happen again or some recommendations etc.
Tools used
There are plenty of Business Intelligence (BI) tools which are used for these purposes. These tools include Open Source tools like Helical Insight, Jaspersoft, Pentaho etc and proprietary tools like Tableau, Sisense, Domo etc.
Data Engineering vs. Data Science vs. Data Analysis
| Data Engineering | Data Science | Data Analysis | |
| Main Focus | Designing, building, and maintaining data pipelines and infrastructure | Extracting insights and knowledge from data using statistical analysis, machine learning, and modeling | Examining data to derive insights and support decision-making processes. |
| Tools | Databases, ETL tools, programming languages | Algorithms, statistical methods, machine learning frameworks, domain knowledge | Statistical methods, data visualization tools, domain knowledge |
| Goal | Ensure data availability, accessibility and reliability | Uncover patterns, trends, correlations | Identify trends, draw conclusions support decision-making |
| Example Tasks | Building data pipelines, database management, data cleaning | Building predictive models, co-relation, regression, conducting data experiments | Analyzing sales data to identify customer preferences |
| Career Role | Data Engineer | Data Scientist | Data Analyst |
Ask On Data: A chat based Data Engineering tool
Ask On Data is a cutting-edge chat-based data engineering and analytics tool that revolutionizes data engineering. It offers a user-friendly interface powered by natural language processing (NLP) and AI capabilities, making data engineering tasks intuitive and accessible to a broader audience.
Helical Insight: Elevating Data Roles
Helical Insight is an embeddable open-source business intelligence platform that empowers users with self service interface to create reports, dashboards and other analysis which can be shared etc. Being open source it allows a cost affective option. Helical Insight comes with many features like embedding, Single Sign On, data security, user role management, exporting, email scheduling, onprem and cloud support, containers like docker kubernetes support etc.