Identifying data sources and ingesting data
With an understanding of the overall business goals for the project, and having identified our data consumers, we can start exploring the available data sources.
While most data sources will be internal to an organization, some projects may require enriching organization-owned data with other third-party data sources. Today, there are many data marketplaces where diverse datasets can be subscribed to or, in some cases, accessed for free. When discussing data sources, both internal and external datasets should be considered.
The team that has been included in the workshop should include people who understand the data sources required for the project. Some of the information that the data engineer needs to gather about these data sources includes the following:
- Details about the source system containing data (is the data in a database, in files on a server, existing files on Amazon S3, coming from a streaming source, and...