InternshipKey terms and common mistakes
The words you will hear in Data Engineering & ETL work and the mistakes that most often cost interns approvals.
Key terms
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| ETL | Extract, Transform, Load |
| OLTP | Transactional application database |
dbt | SQL-based transformation tool |
| Fact table | Measurements/events |
| Object storage | Cheap scalable file storage |
| DAG | Directed Acyclic Graph of tasks |
not_null test | Ensures no missing values |
| Event | Record of something that happened |
Common mistakes to avoid
- Pipelines that cannot be re-run safely and create duplicates.
- No checks for missing or bad data before loading.
- Hard-coding credentials in pipeline code.
- No record of where each dataset came from.
Want to go deeper? The free Data Engineering & ETL learning path has short modules, games and a certificate for each module.