--- title: I Thought Data Engineering Was Just Writing Scripts. I... description: A data analyst documenting their transition to data engineering shares lessons from upgrading a basic ETL pipeline to be more production-ready. Three key... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/i-thought-data-engineering-was-just-writing-scripts-i-was-wrong--kstbhqril twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: I Thought Data Engineering Was Just Writing Scripts. I Was Wrong. | daily.dev og:description: A data analyst documenting their transition to data engineering shares lessons from upgrading a basic ETL pipeline to be more production-ready. Three key... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/i-thought-data-engineering-was-just-writing-scripts-i-was-wrong--kstbhqril og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/KStbHQril.png og:image:alt: I Thought Data Engineering Was Just Writing Scripts. I Was Wrong. og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # I Thought Data Engineering Was Just Writing Scripts. I Was Wrong. **[Towards Data Science](https://daily.dev/sources/tds)** · 9 min read · 1 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A data analyst documenting their transition to data engineering shares lessons from upgrading a basic ETL pipeline to be more production-ready. Three key problems emerged: duplicate data from re-runs (solved with idempotency using SQLite upserts), data loss between sessions (solved by persisting the database to Google Drive), and the need for automated scheduling (identified as the next frontier with tools like Airflow and Prefect). The post concludes that data engineering is fundamentally about building reliable systems, not just writing scripts. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [I Built My Second ETL Pipeline. This Time, I Started Thinking Like a Data Engineer](https://daily.dev/posts/i-built-my-second-etl-pipeline-this-time-i-started-thinking-like-a-data-engineer-3mf1pyvke) · Towards Data Science · 7 upvotes · 0 comments - [A Diary of a Data Engineer](https://daily.dev/posts/a-diary-of-a-data-engineer-djxoyamis) · Data Engineering Blog · 95 upvotes · 1 comments - [What is Data Engineering?](https://daily.dev/posts/what-is-data-engineering--xirjpoghp) · databricks · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#data-engineering](https://daily.dev/tags/data-engineering), [#etl](https://daily.dev/tags/etl), [#python](https://daily.dev/tags/python), [#sqlite](https://daily.dev/tags/sqlite) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/i-thought-data-engineering-was-just-writing-scripts-i-was-wrong--kstbhqril) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"I Thought Data Engineering Was Just Writing Scripts. 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