Shadowing Practice: Vocabulary for Data Engineers - Data Engineering 101 - Learn English Speaking with Video

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have probably all done it.

We have probably all assumed that the people we're talking to

understands the words and terms that we're using that might be very specific to whatever role we have at a company,

even if it's their first day on the job.

Again, I think we're all guilty of doing this.

So I wanted to put together a video for people who are just starting out in the industry

or maybe are just trying to understand what their data engineers are talking about

by putting together a kind of core set of vocabulary that a lot of data engineers tend to use.

To kick this off, let's use the term DAG, D -A -G, or Directed Acyclic Graph.

Basically, this is often an abstraction of tasks that need to happen in a certain series of steps.

That's kind of the whole point.

The directed point of the word basically means that there are multiple tasks, some of which are like going to be upstream and some downstream,

so it's going to go in a certain direction.

Acyclic just refers to the fact that the DAG itself

or the tasks that need occur can't or will only take on one cyclo

so it won't like ever get into an infinite loop

and the graph in this case represents that there's a finite set of nodes and vertices

that all kind of connect to each other those nodes essentially being tasks basically

it ends up looking kind of like this

so often you'll have something like a task a or first task

that then you know task b depends on and then maybe c

and d depend on b but c

and d can both happen at the same time

and then maybe both of those tasks go into you know something like task e to kind of finish it off.

So it's a very basic and simplistic graph of basically tasks.

It's just basically a chart of tasks that go from A to E.

And when someone references the term DAG, that's what they're referencing, a set of tasks that need to occur in a certain order.

And in the data engineering context, when we use the term DAG, we're often also kind of connecting to the concept of a data pipeline,

which will be the next word we're kind of pointing to.

The interesting thing to me about data pipeline is it can honestly cover a lot of different things.

There's a lot of different ways we use and design data pipelines.

There are the more standard data pipelines, often referred to as like batch data pipelines,

which occur at certain time intervals and often follow a pattern of either ETL or ELT,

which just references extract transform load or extract load transform.

And these are just your kind of standard ingestion pipelines,

which will often just take data from sources and then push it into an analytical storage system, which we will get to later.

And that's kind of your standard set of data pipelines.

But on top of that, you also have streaming data pipelines, which often push events directly into often your analytical storage system,

or one of those could be a data lake, could be a data warehouse, which we'll get to.

But there's also, to me personally, integration pipelines that are often managed by things like IPaaS systems,

which IPaaS or IPaaS stands for integration platform as a service.

So these kind of data pipelines tend to integrate across multiple systems.

So whereas your kind of standard ETL will just end up pushing data from source systems like Salesforce

or HubSpot into your either data lake or data warehouse, an iPaaS or an integration style data pipeline often integrates two different source systems together.

So maybe you want to pull data from Salesforce and integrate it with HubSpot.

And then those often connect.

These pipelines, data engineers don't generally develop too often.

These are more, I think, the work that's either done by like enterprise engineers, or, you know, someone who is a Salesforce expert,

because unlike ingesting data and storing it into a data warehouse, you need to understand how the underlying system actually works.

So if you're pulling data, let's say from HubSpot to Salesforce, you actually need to understand what's happening in Salesforce.

And there's a lot of people who are Salesforce admins and Salesforce experts and developers who understand that kind of work.

And so they often I think, are either involved or just the ones who develop those kinds of pipelines.

And look at that.

I've unavoidably added IPaaS, ETL, and ELT along with my data pipeline terminology here, because that's just how it ends up working.

When we end up having a conversation in any field, it's almost hard not to bring in other terms

that we rely on while you're trying to describe the current term you're working with.

So that's the interesting thing to me about data pipelines is

it can honestly mean a lot of different things from more standard batch data pipelines

which usually are again ETL and ELT based

and there's even some other things you could add in there as well to streaming to some things

that are more integration based where you're just trying to integrate data across different systems.

Now often these more standard data pipelines are utilized in such

a way to extract data from some sort of source system like Salesforce

and then push it into an analytical storage system like a data lake data warehouse or data lake house.

So now you've got even more new terms.

So let's start with the classic data warehouse,

which is just basically a place to store your kind of company's information in a way that first of all,

attempts to integrate all of your various entities.

So you might have your finance data, you might have hiring data,

you might and you try to create some sort of model in that data warehouse that represents your business, essentially.

It tries to replicate a lot of everything that you're doing in such a way that one,

it tracks historical information, which is one of the key things.

And two, it tries to integrate all that data across all of these complex systems.

So that way, when I ask a question that maybe involves multiple departments, I can answer that question because I can connect all this data together.

And the fact that it actually tracks historical information, unlike often a lot of source systems,

means that when I ask a question that wants to go back over years, you can actually do that.

You can actually can select data using something

we call slowly changing dimensions often in such a way to actually look at data from a historical point of view,

which we'll get to what we often also reference as SCD here in a second.

But first, let's jump into a data lake.

Obviously, I'm not going in crazy depth in terms of explaining exactly what a data warehouse is.

But one thing I didn't explain there was

that data warehouses tend to have a pretty rigid schema that is predefined when you start.

And thus the data types that are required and used in a data warehouse are limited.

Whereas a data lake is often more of a place that you can start storing raw data.

Often it might be schema -less when you store it

and you might do something that we often reference as schema on RAID,

which is define kind of the schema as you're processing data in the data lake.

And so it's a place where you can often store data that maybe isn't as naturally fitting into your data warehouse,

or maybe it's just too expensive to store in your data warehouse in a more traditional way.

It could also be things like images, text, that is maybe a little more free formatted,

XML, JSON, just again, things that are maybe less structured or semi -structured is often what we reference.

And that's something that often fits into the data lake.

There are multiple reasons why people might store data in a data lake or a data warehouse.

Some of the things have to do with cost, you know, again, size of the data or maybe time,

like maybe you don't have time to figure out

if this data belongs in the data warehouse or

if it even could provide value or how to model it properly to fit in.

And so you might end up storing it in the data lake as a place

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that you can kind of do some work on it.

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You might provide, you know, data scientists or someone the ability to access it

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and work with it in such a way

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that often requires a little bit more of a technical know -how

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because you have to do some either sort of coding or work with it in such a way that's not SQL friendly,

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like you would in often the data warehouse, unless of course you put, you know, something like

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Hive or Presto on top.

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You know, there's, there's definitely a lot of nuances to this.

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And I'm again, speeding over this to just help most people understand what a data lake is from high up above,

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but that's generally a data lake.

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It's often data that's semi -structured to maybe even not structured at all

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that people can store in such a way that should be organized.

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Try not to make a data swamp as many of us describe, but can be utilized for future use.

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Now let's dig into a data warehouse

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because there's a lot of different things you're going to hear the first time you've ever worked in a data warehouse.

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Like the first time I ever worked in a data warehouse, I didn't even realize it was a different thing,

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like in terms of like database versus data warehouse.

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I'd learned relational models.

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And so when I was kind of working in a data warehouse, I was like, okay, there's some things called facts,

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some things called dimensions, but you know, there's like keys and keys are like IDs.

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And so you can connect that way.

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And a lot of it, you know, I just didn't understand that it was a totally different system.

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So let's kind of dive into some of the different key components you can hear.

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Starting with some of the tables, you're going to hear tables that are often referenced as dimensions.

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Dimensions are generally more like categories or descriptors.

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Things like product might be a dimension, person or customer is also generally a dimension.

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You also might have things like category

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and actually even date plays a role in terms of dimension because this tends to describe things like interactions or sales.

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And those sales, like total sales, are often what we reference as facts.

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Facts generally are things that involve business transactions.

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And then everything around that, they used to basically describe that business transaction is generally the dimension.

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So think like location.

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Another way to think about this is, generally speaking, a lot of the times when you're creating like a pivot table,

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a lot of the things that you're going to pivot on are generally dimensions, right?

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Because most of the time someone's going to ask for the average sales by location and maybe quarter.

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So in this case, location and quarter are both dimensions,

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and the total sale end is a summed up version of what would often be data coming from a fact table,

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those sales numbers, or the amount that was sold.

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So that's often what people are referencing when they say fact or dimension.

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They're just different types of tables, and often you're going to be querying around the fact table

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because that's the table that's going to tell you the numbers that you're trying to calculate.

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Now in that, there's also something that I referenced earlier, if you remember, slowly changing dimensions or often as we just call it, SCD.

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And these are thrilling things that basically allow you to track historical data.

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The problem with a lot of source systems is they don't often track historical data.

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Sometimes they do in logs, and that's why we have things like

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Change Data Capture to kind of pull in and track every change that occurs in the data system.

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But Slowly Changing Dimensions allows data warehouses to track changing dimensions over time using different methods.

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You'll hear a lot of different ways that people can do this.

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You'll hear someone say, oh, we're using SCD2 or SCD6.

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And these are just different ways to kind of capture historical information.

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And let me give you some context around this.

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Let's say you're going to create a report

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and you want to count the number of customers in New York City over the last three years.

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Well, over the last three years, people have moved.

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And if you just pull that data out and replace where someone currently lives in your data warehouse,

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they lived in New York and now they moved to Connecticut, or maybe they lived in California and now moved to New York.

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When you run that query, and especially when you do that over time, if you haven't tracked that historical information over time,

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you're going to give the wrong numbers

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because whatever information you're giving is just who currently lives in New York over multiple years, which isn't accurate.

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If someone's moved, they need to not be included in that year that they moved.

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And so that's why slowly changing dimensions are beneficial.

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Often what these look like, if you were to actually see it, is you'll see like, let's say two or three rows with this same,

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let's say, customer's information, or let's say this case let's say employees a job title now with

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that you'll also see start date and end date

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and this is a very simplistic way of looking at it

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so start date end date that gives you that range now when

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that employee changes roles you'll have a new row for the same employee the end date will likely be filled

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or maybe there's often also the option of putting a flag

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that says this row is no longer active

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and then a new row will be created with their new job title

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that will now capture when they started this current job

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so now you've tracked the information of when they worked in this role

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so when someone asks to kind of track historical information on employee roles

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you have it another term that i recall got me in an amazon interview was

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when i think it was someone

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that has to do with like project management was interviewing me

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and asked me about slas

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and i had no idea what in the world an sla was

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because i never had to work with the concept which sla just means service level agreement.

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So when you're building all this stuff, like these data pipelines, these data warehouses, people rely on these systems.

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And if you don't deliver data on time, if your data doesn't have a certain level of quality,

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if you don't know who's responsible for all these things, problems happen throughout the process.

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There's going to be days that something happens upstream that you can't predict and now your data is wrong, or maybe it's late.

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So SLAs, and I'm just going to steal this from locally optimistic, is basically a commitment between a service provider and a client,

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particular aspects of the service, kind of quality, availability, responsibilities that are agreed upon between the service provider and the service user.

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The goal here is that in situations where often this data is required, like let's say for a report every Monday at 8 a .m.,

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that everyone is in full understanding of, one, that there is a due date for this data to exist.

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Two, that there will be people like on call and ready in case at 7 .30 you've figured out that, hey, this data is not there.

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And we know who to call.

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And it just makes sure that everyone is in agreement on what services need to occur

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because here's what happens if you don't have an SLA.

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And I've seen this happen.

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Oh, hey, I made a change to a, let's say a data pipeline last night and it broke some things.

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And in general, no one ever complains when this breaks, but it was Tuesday evening.

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And on Wednesday, there's a board meeting that occurs.

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And in that board meeting, they look at this report that depends on this pipeline being successful.

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And if it's not, you know, the analysts look bad and everyone looks bad.

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But if I don't know that it's happening and that I should be extra careful on Tuesday, hey, I'm going to keep pushing data,

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and then everyone's going to be upset.

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Now, obviously, I shouldn't be breaking data pipelines.

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But the point more is that everyone knows.

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So that way, software engineers, as they're making changes to their systems upstream, you know, those conversations can happen.

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And so that's the goal of an SLA.

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It's to make sure you're building trust.

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It's to make sure everyone understands what needs to occur when.

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Because, again, it's hard to say that, you know, let's say data engineering is responsible if they're unaware

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that there is some sort of end goal that needs to always be successful at a certain time.

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And so that's why you'll hear things like SLAs is because oftentimes you need to kind of branch this gap between,

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you know, the engineering side and maybe more the analytical side

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and the business side so that everyone understands when things are supposed to exist or when things are supposed to happen.

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And there's a certain level of trustworthiness

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and a level of like knowing this data will be here 99 .999 % of the time.

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Now with that, this will end video one of data engineering vocab.

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I really want to do some others where we're going to talk about things like Hedipotent, acid.

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We're going to talk about some of the SQL terms that you might hear that people just throw around.

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You're like, why did this person say CTE?

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What is that?

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So I have hopefully more of these planned depending on how this video goes.

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And so, yeah, I really appreciate all of your guys' time and I will see you next time.

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Thank you and goodbye.

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220 sentences

Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This speaking lesson is built on the video “Vocabulary for Data Engineers - Data Engineering 101”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: warehouse, pipeline, dimension, task, lake. This video has 219 sentences and 3114 words to shadow. The speech runs for 15:05. The speaker talks fast, about 206 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 85% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.

Key vocabulary in this video

15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
warehouse noun	/ˈwɛə(ɹ)haʊs/	A facility for storing large amounts of merchandise or products.
pipeline noun	/ˈpaɪpˌlaɪn/	A conduit made of pipes used to convey water, gas or petroleum, etc.
dimension noun	/daɪˈmɛn.ʃən/	A single aspect of a given thing.
occur verb	/əˈkɜː/	To happen or take place.
integrate verb	/ˈɪn.tɪ.ɡɹeɪt/	To include as a constituent part or functionality.
connect verb	/kəˈnɛkt/	To join (to another object): to attach, or to be intended to attach or capable of attaching, to another object.
integration noun	/ˌɪn.tɪˈɡɹeɪ.ʃən/	The act or process of making whole or entire.
depend verb	/dɪˈpɛnd/	To be contingent or conditioned; to have something as a necessary condition
analytical adjective	/ˌæn.əˈlɪt.ɪ.kəl/	Of or pertaining to analysis; resolving into elements or constituent parts
capture verb	/ˈkæp.(t)ʃɚ/	To take control of; to seize by force or stratagem.
graph noun	/ɡɹæf/	A data chart (graphical representation of data) intended to illustrate the relationship between a set (or sets) of numbers (quantities, measurements or…
extract noun	/ˈɛkstɹækt/	Something that is extracted or drawn out.
upstream adjective	/ʌpˈstɹiːm/	In a direction against the flow of a current or stream of fluid (typically water); upriver.
refer verb	/ɹɪˈfɜː/	To direct the attention of (someone toward something).
essentially adverb	/ɪˈsɛnʃəli/	In essence: by nature.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Meaning
end up verb	To bring to a conclusion.
figure out verb	To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce.
put together verb	To assemble, construct, build, or formulate.
sum up verb	To produce a total by adding.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	are often managed · are utilized · is predefined
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	I've unavoidably added · you've ever worked · have moved
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	people who are · someone who is · ones who develop

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 68 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, we're, don't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: thrill /θɹɪl/, trustworthiness /ˈtɹʌst.wɜɹ.ði.nɛs/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: dimension /daɪˈmɛn.ʃən/, integration /ˌɪn.tɪˈɡɹeɪ.ʃən/, capture /ˈkæp.(t)ʃɚ/, essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/, transaction /tɹænˈzækʃən/
Long words — get the stress right: integration /ˌɪn.tɪˈɡɹeɪ.ʃən/, analytical /ˌæn.əˈlɪt.ɪ.kəl/, essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/, naturally /ˈnæt͡ʃ.(ə.)ɹə.li/, interaction /ˌɪn.təˈɹæk.ʃən/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like warehouse, pipeline, dimension.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: Vocabulary for Data Engineers - Data Engineering 101 - Learn English Speaking with Video

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