What is Data Pipeline?
A data pipeline is an automated series of steps that moves data from one or more sources to a destination, often cleaning it along the way.
Data Pipeline explained
Pipelines replace manual exports and copy-and-paste. They run on a schedule or when new data arrives, and they handle the repetitive work: connecting to the source, extracting changes, applying rules and loading the result.
A good pipeline also records what ran and whether it succeeded, because silent failures produce dashboards that look fine but are stale.
Example
A pipeline pulls yesterday's ad spend from three ad platforms at 6am, converts currencies and appends it to a spend table that the marketing dashboard reads.