Chapter 3 is where things get real. Up to now the book was setting the stage, explaining what data engineering is, showing you around GCP. Now Adi Wijaya says: okay, let’s actually build something. And the something is a data warehouse in BigQuery.
Chapter 1 starts with a confession most of us in the data world can relate to. Adi Wijaya says he used to think data was clean. Neatly organized, ready to go. Then he actually worked with data in real organizations and realized most of the effort goes into collecting, cleaning, and transforming it. Not the fun machine learning part. The plumbing part.
Chapter 1 gave us the “who” and “why” of data engineering. Now it is time for the “where.” Where does all that data actually live? How do organizations store, organize, and serve billions of rows of information so that someone on the business side can pull up a dashboard and make a decision before lunch?