Data Pipeline Engineering

Overview

Data pipelines fail silently. Bad data propagates downstream before anyone notices. Reprocessing a non-idempotent pipeline corrupts your warehouse.

Core principle: EVERY PIPELINE STEP IS IDEMPOTENT AND PRODUCES VERIFIABLE OUTPUT. If you can't safely re-run any step at any time, your pipeline is a ticking bomb.

Violating the letter of this process is violating the spirit of data engineering.

The Iron Law

EVERY PIPELINE STEP IS IDEMPOTENT AND PRODUCES VERIFIABLE OUTPUT

If re-running a step produces different results or duplicates data, you cannot ship it.

When to Use