getting-started VS meltano

Coincidently, I saw a presentation today on a nice half-way-house solution: using embeddable Python libraries like Sling and dlt - both open-source. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAqOLgG2iYY There is also singer.io which is more of a protocol than a library, but can also be installed although it looks like it is a true community effort and not so well maintained.

Singer is an open-source framework for data ingestion, which provides a standardized way to move data between various data sources and destinations (such as databases, APIs, and data warehouses). Singer offers a modular approach to data extraction and loading by leveraging two main components: Taps (data extractors) and Targets (data loaders). This design makes it an attractive option for data ingestion for several reasons:

Thanks for chipping in.

I’ve been leaning towards this direction. I think I/O is the biggest part that in the case of plain code steps still needs fixing. Input being data/stream and parameterization/config and output being some sort of typed data/stream.

My “let’s not reinvent the wheel” alarm is going of when I write that though. Examples that come to mind are text based (Unix / https://scale.com/blog/text-universal-interface) but also the Singer tap protocol (https://github.com/singer-io/getting-started/blob/master/doc...). And config obviously having many standard forms like ini, yaml, json, environment key value pairs and more.

At the same time, text feels horribly inefficient as encoding for some of the data objects being passed around in these flows. More specialized and optimized binary formats come to mind (Arrow, HDF5, Protobuf).

Plenty of directions to explore, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. I wonder which direction is favored by users of tools like ours. Will be good to poll (do they even care?).

PS Windmill looks equally impressive! Nice job

Mage uses the Singer Spec (https://github.com/singer-io/getting-started/blob/master/docs/SPEC.md), the data engineer community standard for building data integrations. This was created by Stitch and is widely adopted.

I like the Singer Protocol, and the various tools that use it. These include meltano, airbyte, stitch, pipelinewise, and a few others

Have you looked into using a dedicated data integration tool? Have you heard of Singer and the Singer Spec? https://github.com/singer-io/getting-started/blob/master/docs/SPEC.md

Or you could build your own such system and run it on Airflow, Prefect, Dagster, etc. Check out the Singer project for a suite of Python packages designed for such a task. Quality varies greatly, though.

Our team is building out a data platform on AWS glue, and we pull from a variety of data sources including application databases and third party SaaS APIs. I have been looking into ways to standardize pulling data from different sources. The other day I came across the [Singer Specification](https://github.com/singer-io/getting-started) and was interested learning more about it. If anyone has experience working with Singer specifications, I would love to hear more about:

I just read the readme of the Singer getting started repo and am excited to write my first tap! I’m thinking instead of writing a new Airflow DAG whenever I want to pipe API data into our data warehouse I could write a singer tap and use Stitch instead. Is that a stupid idea?

I would use something like meltano or airbyte, but if you really want to use Lambda for extraction I'd say there is no point spinning up a Redshift cluster just for that, Athena would be the way to go and you can use dbt pretty nicely with it and it would keep costs down.

Airbyte and Singer/Meltano if you want to learn more about ingestion pipelines. Airbyte and Meltano teams are very welcoming. SQLfluff a shiny SQL linter. Beautiful project with awesome maintainers.

I know really sure if this is what are you looking for, but take a look at Meltano

I'm not aware of any. I did just open this issue[0] in the Meltano project to open discussion with the team/community. It could be an interesting iteration on the Singer Spec[1] if we find that users are interested in it and it helps solve some bottleneck challenges.

[0] https://gitlab.com/meltano/meltano/-/issues/2616

Good point! As expected, there's an issue about adding it already: https://gitlab.com/meltano/meltano/-/issues/1175

At GitLab, we're not ready to give up on the Singer spec, community, and ecosystem yet, which is why I've been working on Meltano for the past year: https://meltano.com/

We think that the biggest things holding back Singer are the lack of documentation and tooling around taking existing taps and targets to production, and around building, debugging, maintaining, and testing new or existing high-quality taps and targets.

Meltano itself addresses the first problem, and provides a robust and reliable platform for building, running & orchestrating Singer- and dbt-based ELT pipelines.

At the same time, we have been working with some members of the community on a new framework for building taps and targets: https://gitlab.com/meltano/meltano/-/issues/2401, which we have decided to call the Singer SDK: https://gitlab.com/meltano/singer-sdk