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. Data Pipelines gather data from multiple sources, transform it into analytics-ready data, and make it available to data consumers for analytics and decision-making. Data repositories, such as relational and non-relational databases, data warehouses, data marts, data lakes, and big data stores process and store this data. Data Integration Platforms combine disparate data into a unified view for the data consumers. You will learn about each of these components in this course. You will also learn about Big Data and the use of some of the Big Data processing tools. A typical Data Engineering lifecycle includes architecting data platforms, designing data stores, and gathering, importing, wrangling, querying, and analyzing data. It also includes performance monitoring and finetuning to ensure systems are performing at optimal levels. In this course, you will learn about the data engineering lifecycle. You will also learn about security, governance, and compliance. Data Engineering is recognized as one of the fastest-growing fields today. The career opportunities available in the field and the different paths you can take to enter this field are discussed in the course. The course also includes hands-on labs that guide you to create your IBM Cloud Lite account, provision a database instance, load data into the database instance, and perform some basic querying operations that help you understand your dataset.