Field note · June 22, 2023
Reader question — What a pipeline is really doing
Extract, load, transform — why the industry flipped the last two letters, and what a pipeline owes you beyond moving bytes.
Reader question on What a pipeline is really doing, and the answer belongs somewhere more findable than an email.
Extract, load, transform — why the industry flipped the last two letters, and what a pipeline owes you beyond moving bytes.
The question was, roughly, "when does this stop applying?" — which is the right question and the one lessons routinely fail to answer. Every technique has a range of validity, and stating it is what separates a lesson from a recipe.
It sits in the Getting the data in module. The exercise is a thinking one rather than a query one — some of this material is about deciding what to compute, and that does not need a keyboard.
Ordering matters here more than in most courses. It follows A working setup that will not embarrass you and leads into Batch, streaming, and the honest difference, and reading it out of sequence mostly works but costs you the setup.
Free means free, and it also means we can rewrite it whenever it is wrong. No edition, no errata PDF, nothing to repurchase. The whole course is 36 lessons and the fixes land the day we find them.