Data Science & Machine Learning Data Engineering, Deployment and Projects Syllabus

Data Engineering, Deployment and Projects syllabus — full chapter and topic list

Expand any chapter to see its topics and sub-topics. This is the whole examinable outline for Data Engineering, Deployment and Projects in Data Science & Machine Learning, not a summary of it.

1. 1

   Databases and SQL for Data Science

   3 topics

   • Relational Concepts
     • Tables, keys and relationships
   • SQL Querying
     • SELECT, WHERE and ORDER BY
     • JOINs and GROUP BY
     • Subqueries and aggregate functions
   • Connecting Python to Databases
     • SQLAlchemy and connectors
2. 2

   Big Data and Data Pipelines

   3 topics

   • Big Data Concepts
     • Volume, velocity and variety
     • Hadoop and Spark overview
   • ETL Workflows
     • Extract, transform and load
   • Web Scraping and APIs
     • BeautifulSoup and requests
     • Consuming REST APIs
3. 3

   Model Deployment and MLOps

   3 topics

   • Model Serialization
     • Pickle and joblib
   • Building ML APIs
     • Flask and FastAPI
     • Streamlit apps
   • MLOps Fundamentals
     • Version control with Git
     • Model monitoring and retraining
     • Containerization with Docker
4. 4

   Capstone Projects and Best Practices

   3 topics

   • End-to-End Project Lifecycle
     • Problem framing and data collection
     • Modeling and evaluation
     • Reporting results
   • Reproducibility and Documentation
     • Notebooks and environments
   • Ethics and Responsible AI
     • Bias and fairness
     • Data privacy

Data Engineering, Deployment and Projects flashcards for Data Science & Machine Learning

24 of 51 cards from the Data Engineering, Deployment and Projects deck — real questions with worked answers.

1. In a relational database, what is a primary key?

   A column (or set of columns) that uniquely identifies each row in a table. It cannot be NULL and must be unique.

2. What is a foreign key in relational databases?

   A column in one table that references the primary key of another table, enforcing referential integrity between the two tables.

3. What do the ACID properties of a transaction stand for?

   Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability.

4. What is database normalization?

   The process of organizing tables to reduce data redundancy and improve integrity by decomposing them into related tables (e.g., 1NF, 2NF, 3NF).

5. What distinguishes a one-to-many from a many-to-many relationship?

   In one-to-many, one row in table A relates to many rows in table B. In many-to-many, rows in both tables relate to multiple rows in the other, requiring a junction (bridge) table.

6. What is the difference between the SQL WHERE and HAVING clauses?

   WHERE filters individual rows before aggregation; HAVING filters groups after aggregation (used with GROUP BY).

7. What does an INNER JOIN return versus a LEFT JOIN?

   INNER JOIN returns only rows with matching keys in both tables. LEFT JOIN returns all rows from the left table plus matched rows from the right (NULLs where no match).

8. What is the logical order of execution of SQL clauses?

   FROM → WHERE → GROUP BY → HAVING → SELECT → ORDER BY → LIMIT.

9. Name four common SQL aggregate functions.

   COUNT, SUM, AVG, MIN/MAX.

10. What is the difference between WHERE and the GROUP BY clause's purpose?

    WHERE filters rows; GROUP BY collapses rows into groups so aggregate functions can be applied per group.

11. What is a SQL subquery?

    A query nested inside another query, used in clauses like WHERE, FROM, or SELECT to compute intermediate results.

12. What is the difference between DELETE and TRUNCATE in SQL?

    DELETE removes rows (optionally filtered with WHERE) and is logged/rollbackable; TRUNCATE quickly removes all rows, is minimally logged, and resets the table.

13. In Python, what is a database connection cursor used for?

    A cursor is an object used to execute SQL statements and fetch query results row by row from a database connection.

14. Why should you use parameterized queries when connecting Python to a database?

    To prevent SQL injection attacks and let the driver handle proper escaping/typing of input values.

15. What is SQLAlchemy in the Python ecosystem?

    A Python SQL toolkit and Object-Relational Mapper (ORM) that lets you interact with databases using Python objects and a unified API across DB engines.

16. Which pandas function reads SQL query results into a DataFrame?

    pandas.read_sql (or read_sql_query / read_sql_table), given a query and a connection/engine.

17. What are the classic '3 Vs' of Big Data?

    Volume (scale of data), Velocity (speed of generation/processing), and Variety (different data types/formats).

18. What is Apache Hadoop's core role in big data?

    A framework for distributed storage (HDFS) and distributed processing (MapReduce) of large datasets across clusters of commodity hardware.

19. What is the main advantage of Apache Spark over Hadoop MapReduce?

    Spark performs in-memory computation, making it much faster for iterative and interactive workloads than disk-based MapReduce.

20. What is the difference between a data lake and a data warehouse?

    A data lake stores raw data in many formats (schema-on-read); a data warehouse stores structured, processed data optimized for querying (schema-on-write).

21. What does the MapReduce programming model consist of?

    A Map phase that processes and emits key-value pairs in parallel, and a Reduce phase that aggregates values by key.

22. What does ETL stand for, and what is its order?

    Extract, Transform, Load: extract data from sources, transform/clean it, then load it into a target system.

23. How does ELT differ from ETL?

    In ELT, data is Extracted and Loaded into the target (often a data warehouse/lake) first, then Transformed in place using the target's compute.

24. What is idempotency in the context of ETL/data pipelines?

    The property that running a pipeline step multiple times produces the same result, preventing duplicate or inconsistent data on re-runs.

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