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

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.

Sep 14th 2026
4 Weeks
Clinical Data Models and Data Quality Assessments (Coursera) Coursera
University of Colorado System

Clinical Data Models and Data Quality Assessments (Coursera)

This course aims to teach the concepts of clinical data models and common data models. Upon completion of this course, learners will be able to interpret and evaluate data model designs using Entity-Relationship Diagrams (ERDs), differentiate between data models and articulate how each are used to support clinical care and data science, and create SQL statements in Google BigQuery to query the MIMIC3 clinical data model and the OMOP common data model.

Sep 21st 2026
5-12 Weeks
AI Skills for Engineers: Data Engineering and Data Pipelines (edX) EdX
Delft University of Technology,DelftX

AI Skills for Engineers: Data Engineering and Data Pipelines (edX)

Good data is central to effective AI applications. This course teaches the basics of data for AI, covering what data is needed, how to extract data from existing databases and basic data skills including setup of a Python notebook environment, basic data exploration and simple data visualizations.

Self Paced
Self-Paced
Cloud Computing Applications, Part 2: Big Data and Applications in the Cloud (Coursera) Coursera
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Cloud Computing Applications, Part 2: Big Data and Applications in the Cloud (Coursera)

Welcome to the Cloud Computing Applications course, the second part of a two-course series designed to give you a comprehensive view on the world of Cloud Computing and Big Data! In this second course we continue Cloud Computing Applications by exploring how the Cloud opens up data analytics of huge volumes of data that are static or streamed at high velocity and represent an enormous variety of information. Cloud applications and data analytics represent a disruptive change in the ways that society is informed by, and uses information.

Sep 14th 2026
4 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
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
Análise de dados com Python (Coursera) Coursera
IBM

Análise de dados com Python (Coursera)

Saiba como analisar dados usando Python. Este curso abrange desde o básico do Python até a exploração de diferentes tipos de dados. Você aprenderá como preparar dados para análise, executar análises estatísticas simples, criar visualizações de dados significativas, prever tendências futuras a partir de dados, e muito mais!

Oct 2nd 2023
5-12 Weeks
Getting Started with Data Warehousing and BI Analytics (Coursera) Coursera
IBM

Getting Started with Data Warehousing and BI Analytics (Coursera)

Data is one of an organization’s most valuable commodities. But how can organizations best use their data? And how does the organization determine which data is the most recent, accurate, and useful for business decision making at the highest level? After taking this course, you will be able to describe different kinds of repositories including data marts, data lakes, and data reservoirs, and explain their functions and uses.

Jul 6th 2026
4 Weeks
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
Healthcare Data Models (Coursera) Coursera
University of California, Davis

Healthcare Data Models (Coursera)

Career prospects are bright for those qualified to work in healthcare data analytics. Perhaps you work in data analytics, but are considering a move into healthcare where your work can improve people’s quality of life. If so, this course gives you a glimpse into why this work matters, what you’d be doing in this role, and what takes place on the Path to Value where data is gathered from patients at the point of care, moves into data warehouses to be prepared for analysis, then moves along the data pipeline to be transformed into valuable insights that can save lives, reduce costs, to improve healthcare and make it more accessible and affordable.

Sep 14th 2026
4 Weeks
Python Project for Data Engineering (Coursera) Coursera
IBM

Python Project for Data Engineering (Coursera)

This mini-course is intended to apply foundational Python skills by implementing different techniques to collect and work with data. Assume the role of a Data Engineer and extract data from multiple file formats, transform it into specific datatypes, and then load it into a single source for analysis. Continue with the course and test your knowledge by implementing webscraping and extracting data with APIs all with the help of multiple hands-on labs. After completing this course you will have acquired the confidence to begin collecting large datasets from multiple sources and transform them into one primary source, or begin web scraping to gain valuable business insights all with the use of Python.

Sep 14th 2026
1 Week