The Alteryx data engineer

The Alteryx Software stack, comprising Alteryx Designer, Alteryx Server, and Alteryx Connect, is the core tool an Alteryx data engineer uses to build, deploy, and publicize the datasets and data pipelines created. Following an iterative development process, a data engineer quickly finds a dataset, transforms the dataset, and then provides the dataset to end users.

In Chapter 1, Getting Started, we introduced the components of the Alteryx platform and demonstrated their use in a simple example. We also introduced the working definition of data engineering as follows:

Data engineering is the process of taking data from any number of disparate sources and transforming it into a usable format for an end user.

This definition provided a starting point for building a process for accessing data sources and making them a valuable resource for our end users. Using Alteryx provided three key benefits for you as a data engineer:

• Speed of development
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