Glossary · letter D
Data Pipeline
Automated data flow from source to destination
Definition
A sequence of automated steps that fetch data from sources (systems, APIs, files), process it (filtering, joining, transformation) and load it into a target system (data warehouse, report, model). A well-built data pipeline runs without human oversight and self-reports errors.
Business application
An e-commerce company needs a nightly pipeline that pulls sales data from the shop platform, returns data from the CRM and inventory data from the WMS, joins them and loads them into the warehouse. In the morning, the sales director sees a KPI dashboard — without analyst involvement.