DBgen: A Python Library for Defining Scalable, Maintainable, Accessible, Reconfigurable, Transparent (SMART) Data Pipelines

In this work, we present DBgen, a Python library that provides a framework for defining extract-transform-load (ETL) pipelines to create and populate SQL databases. DBgen is most useful when the underlying data has complex relationships, requires multi-step analysis, is large-scale, and the type of data being collected changes frequently. Scientific data often fits this description. With current tooling, defining ETL pipelines for this particularly difficult- to-manage data is so onerous that a great deal of it does not end up being stored in a database and is opaque. DBgen is designed to fill the gap in the current tooling and reduce the barrier to defining ETL pipelines such data.