The holiday rush finds data engineers (still) up to their ears in complex pipelines, broken integrations, and requests for analytics at scale. With never-ending data sources and questions coming in fast from the business, it can feel a lot like driving a one-horse open sleigh through a snowstorm.
Pain points around systems connectivity, pipeline resilience, data quality, and self-service access threaten to be this year’s data integration Grinch. Fractured data means fractured insights, stopping your organization from providing the gift of data to the business.
But by unwrapping battle-tested data infrastructure advice, there’s a way through the storm. With smart design and resilient pipelines as your foundation, you can confidently face the holiday crunch and any data dilemmas the new year holds.
In this post, we’re recapping some of our most popular 2023 resources guaranteed to spread data cheer.
1. The Business Value of Data Engineering
After working with our data engineering community day in and day out for a decade, we know how much value your work brings to the organizations you work for. But do they know? And do they do everything they can to set you up for success? We surveyed over 500 of your data engineer peers and over 750 business data consumers to find out.
The research shows that when data engineers have proper business context and collaborate closely with business teams, they are able to provide better data solutions and drive more value. Read the report to see how your org stacks up and for recommendations that can help transition your role into being a strategic partner.
2. Simplifying Data Transformations in Snowflake for Analytics
Once upon a time, StreamSets was an open-source on-prem company transitioning to the cloud. We faced many of the same challenges our clients face: rigid data structures, inability to add high-volume data sources, and infrastructure challenges.
In this webinar, we share the story of our successful journey to Snowflake by ‘drinking our own champagne’ – aka, using StreamSets and Software AG to get there. Watch to find out how we leveraged a broad set of capabilities, including StreamSets’ resilient pipelines, fragments, and User Defined Functions (UDFs) powered by Snowpark — and much more.
3. 10 Best Practices for Modern Data Integration
Moving data has become much more complex in the modern enterprise. With data architectures spanning cloud, on-prem, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments, brittle pipelines simply won’t cut it. This whitepaper outlines 10 best practices for developing an adaptive data integration practice that eliminates data friction.
Key themes include maximizing connectivity while minimizing custom coding, architecting for constant change, and taking a DataOps approach to optimize data operations. By following modern integration best practices, technical users can overcome data silos, ensure governance, and power analytics success across the business. If building resilient pipelines and enabling self-service analytics are part of your 2023 data resolution list, be sure to read this whitepaper. It lays out the modern integration advantage needed to master today’s complex data landscapes.
4. The Data Engineers’ Handbook
This handy guide outlines four critical pipeline patterns for ingesting, landing, and transforming data into cloud platforms. From raw data lakes to conformed datasets, data engineers will value the detailed examples, best practices, and emphasis on building resilient pipelines. Consider this your blueprint for migrating data workloads into the cloud efficiently.
5. Accessing and Ingesting Mainframe Data for Agile Regulatory Compliance Reporting with Snowflake
Regulatory compliance reporting may require including mainframe data, but getting at that data and keeping up with the requests can be challenging. This webinar covers how you can streamline and improve cross-team efficiencies for mainframe data access. And with intuitive self-service, robust CDC pipelines, and built-in security and governance.
Data engineers and IT teams will learn an easy solution to empower business users with mainframe data for compliance reporting — while maintaining control. See how to deliver valuable mainframe data to Snowflake via automated CDC pipelines that you can “set and forget.”
Wrapping Up the Year With Insights
As the year comes to an end, we encourage data engineers everywhere to assess whether your organization properly empowers you to be the strategic partner the business needs. With the right executive support, business alignment, modern tools, and robust infrastructure behind you, imagine what your team could achieve!
Whether simplifying transformations, ingesting mainframe data, or following modern integration best practices, we hope this gift of knowledge helps you confidently face each data dilemma ahead. With resilience, scale, and analytics velocity as your pillars going into 2024, you can transform data frustrations into celebrations.
From our data family to yours, happy holidays! May your new year overflow with reliable pipelines, understanding stakeholders, and the resources that make engineering data joy possible. Now, excuse us while we head for the eggnog to dream up more ways to deck your data infrastructure halls. 
The post Delivering Data Cheer: 2023’s Top Resources Recapped — Data Engineer Edition appeared first on StreamSets.
