ETL and Data Pipelines with Shell, Airflow and Kafka (Coursera)

Offered by IBM,
ETL and Data Pipelines with Shell, Airflow and Kafka (Coursera)

After taking this course, you will be able to describe two different approaches to converting raw data into analytics-ready data. One approach is the Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) process. The other contrasting approach is the Extract, Load, and Transform (ELT) process. ETL processes apply to data warehouses and data marts. ELT processes apply to data lakes, where the data is transformed on demand by the requesting/calling application.

Class Deals by MOOC List - Click here and see Coursera's Active Discounts, Deals, and Promo Codes.

Both ETL and ELT extract data from source systems, move the data through the data pipeline, and store the data in destination systems. During this course, you will experience how ELT and ETL processing differ and identify use cases for both.
You will identify methods and tools used for extracting the data, merging extracted data either logically or physically, and for importing data into data repositories. You will also define transformations to apply to source data to make the data credible, contextual, and accessible to data users. You will be able to outline some of the multiple methods for loading data into the destination system, verifying data quality, monitoring load failures, and the use of recovery mechanisms in case of failure.
Finally, you will complete a shareable final project that enables you to demonstrate the skills you acquired in each module.

Course 11 of 13 in the IBM Data Engineering Professional Certificate

Syllabus

WEEK 1
Data Processing Techniques
ETL or Extract, Transform, and Load processes are used for cases where flexibility, speed, and scalability of data are important. You will explore some key differences been similar processes, ETL and ELT, which include the place of transformation, flexibility, Big Data support, and time-to-insight.
You will learn that there is an increasing demand for access to raw data that drives the evolution from ETL to ELT. Data extraction involves advanced technologies including database querying, web scraping, and APIs. You will also learn that data transformation is about formatting data to suit the application and that data is loaded in batches or streamed continuously.

WEEK 2
ETL & Data Pipelines: Tools and Techniques
Extract, transform and load (ETL) pipelines are created with Bash scripts that can be run on a schedule using cron. Data pipelines move data from one place, or form, to another. Data pipeline processes include scheduling or triggering, monitoring, maintenance, and optimization. Furthermore, Batch pipelines extract and operate on batches of data. Whereas streaming data pipelines ingest data packets one-by-one in rapid succession. In this module, you will learn that streaming pipelines apply when the most current data is needed. You will explore that parallelization and I/O buffers help mitigate bottlenecks. You will also learn how to describe data pipeline performance in terms of latency and throughput.

WEEK 3
Building Data Pipelines using Airflow
The key advantage of Apache Airflow's approach to representing data pipelines as DAGs is that they are expressed as code, which makes your data pipelines more maintainable, testable, and collaborative. Tasks, the nodes in a DAG, are created by implementing Airflow's built-in operators.
In this module, you will learn about Apache Airflow having a rich UI that simplifies working with data pipelines. You will explore how to visualize your DAG in graph or tree mode. You will also learn about the key components of a DAG definition file, and you will learn that Airflow logs are saved into local file systems and then sent to cloud storage, search engines, and log analyzers.

WEEK 4
Building Streaming Pipelines using Kafka
Apache Kafka is a very popular open source event streaming pipeline. An event is a type of data that describes the entity’s observable state updates over time. Popular Kafka service providers include Confluent Cloud, IBM Event Stream, and Amazon MSK. Additionally, Kafka Streams API is a client library supporting you with data processing in event streaming pipelines.
In this module, you will learn that the core components of Kafka are brokers, topics, partitions, replications, producers, and consumers. You will explore two special types of processors in the Kafka Stream API stream-processing topology: The source processor and the sink processor. You will also learn about building event streaming pipelines using Kafka.

WEEK 5
Final Assignment
In this final assignment module, you will apply your newly gained knowledge to explore two very exciting hands-on labs. “Creating ETL Data Pipelines using Apache Airflow” and “Creating Streaming Data Pipelines using Kafka”. You will explore building these ETL pipelines using real-world scenarios.
You will extract, transform, and load data into a CSV file. You will also create a topic named “toll” in Apache Kafka, download and customize a streaming data consumer, as well as verifying that streaming data has been collected in the database table.

Go to Class
MOOC List is learner-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Related Courses

Advanced Data Engineering (Coursera) Coursera
Duke University

Advanced Data Engineering (Coursera)

In this advanced course, you will gain practical expertise in scaling data engineering systems using cutting-edge tools and techniques. This course is designed for data scientists, data engineers, and anyone with a foundational understanding of data handling who desires to escalate their skills to handle larger, more complex datasets efficiently.

Jul 27th 2026
4 Weeks
Data Integration with Microsoft Azure Data Factory (Coursera) Coursera
Microsoft

Data Integration with Microsoft Azure Data Factory (Coursera)

In this course, you will learn how to create and manage data pipelines in the cloud using Azure Data Factory. This course is part of a Specialization intended for Data engineers and developers who want to demonstrate their expertise in designing and implementing data solutions that use Microsoft Azure data services. It is ideal for anyone interested in preparing for the DP-203: Data Engineering on Microsoft Azure exam (beta).

Jan 6th 2025
5-12 Weeks
Building ETL and Data Pipelines with Bash, Airflow and Kafka (edX) EdX
IBM

Building ETL and Data Pipelines with Bash, Airflow and Kafka (edX)

This course provides you with practical skills to build and manage data pipelines and Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) processes using shell scripts, Airflow and Kafka. Well-designed and automated data pipelines and ETL processes are the foundation of a successful Business Intelligence platform. Defining your data workflows, pipelines and processes early in the platform design ensures the right raw data is collected, transformed and loaded into desired storage layers and available for processing and analysis as and when required.

Self Paced
Self-Paced
Databases and SQL for Data Science with Python(Coursera) Coursera
IBM

Databases and SQL for Data Science with Python(Coursera)

Much of the world's data resides in databases. SQL (or Structured Query Language) is a powerful language which is used for communicating with and extracting data from databases. A working knowledge of databases and SQL is a must if you want to become a data scientist. The purpose of this course is to introduce relational database concepts and help you learn and apply foundational knowledge of the SQL language. It is also intended to get you started with performing SQL access in a data science environment.

Jul 6th 2026
4 Weeks
The Path to Insights: Data Models and Pipelines (Coursera) Coursera
Google

The Path to Insights: Data Models and Pipelines (Coursera)

This is the second of three courses in the Google Business Intelligence Certificate. In this course, you'll explore data modeling and how databases are designed. Then you’ll learn about extract, transform, load (ETL) processes that extract data from source systems, transform it into formats that enable analysis, and drive business processes and goals.

Jul 27th 2026
4 Weeks
Big Data Science with the BD2K-LINCS Data Coordination and Integration Center (Coursera) Coursera
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Big Data Science with the BD2K-LINCS Data Coordination and Integration Center (Coursera)

In this course we briefly introduce the DCIC and the various Centers that collect data for LINCS. We then cover metadata and how metadata is linked to ontologies. We then present data processing and normalization methods to clean and harmonize LINCS data. This follow discussions about how data is served as RESTful APIs. Most importantly, the course covers computational methods including: data clustering, gene-set enrichment analysis, interactive data visualization, and supervised learning. Finally, we introduce crowdsourcing/citizen-science projects where students can work together in teams to extract expression signatures from public databases and then query such collections of signatures against LINCS data for predicting small molecules as potential therapeutics.

Jul 27th 2026
5-12 Weeks
Advanced Data Science Capstone (Coursera) Coursera
IBM

Advanced Data Science Capstone (Coursera)

This project completer has proven a deep understanding on massive parallel data processing, data exploration and visualization, advanced machine learning and deep learning and how to apply his knowledge in a real-world practical use case where he justifies architectural decisions, proves understanding the characteristics of different algorithms, frameworks and technologies and how they impact model performance and scalability.

Aug 12th 2024
4 Weeks
Analytical Solutions to Common Healthcare Problems (Coursera) Coursera
University of California, Davis

Analytical Solutions to Common Healthcare Problems (Coursera)

In this course, we’re going to go over analytical solutions to common healthcare problems. I will review these business problems and you’ll build out various data structures to organize your data. We’ll then explore ways to group data and categorize medical codes into analytical categories. You will then be able to extract, transform, and load data into data structures required for solving medical problems and be able to also harmonize data from multiple sources.

Aug 3rd 2026
4 Weeks
Data Warehouse Concepts, Design, and Data Integration (Coursera) Coursera
University of Colorado System

Data Warehouse Concepts, Design, and Data Integration (Coursera)

This is the second course in the Data Warehousing for Business Intelligence specialization. Ideally, the courses should be taken in sequence. In this course, you will learn exciting concepts and skills for designing data warehouses and creating data integration workflows. These are fundamental skills for data warehouse developers and administrators. You will have hands-on experience for data warehouse design and use open source products for manipulating pivot tables and creating data integration workflows.

Aug 3rd 2026
5-12 Weeks
Introduction to Data Engineering (Coursera) Coursera
IBM

Introduction to Data Engineering (Coursera)

This course introduces you to the core concepts, processes, and tools you need to know in order to get a foundational knowledge of data engineering. You will gain an understanding of the modern data ecosystem and the role Data Engineers, Data Scientists, and Data Analysts play in this ecosystem. The Data Engineering Ecosystem includes several different components. It includes disparate data types, formats, and sources of data.

Aug 3rd 2026
4 Weeks