ETL and Data Engineering - is it purely the knowledge of tools or is there theory behind it?
First of all I just want to say that I am not a data engineer and there is definitely someone out there that can answer this better than me.
I do think that there is a lot of theory behind data engineering. It is also very interesting. I too thought that it was boring and I was more interested in just data science/ machine learning. I am not sure if I can say exactly what principles data engineering is based on but it is about how to best store data, access data and creating underlying systems for more efficient computing. The first paper I read that really got me interested in this stuff was the original paper for Spark.
I also just did a quick google for data engineering PhD and came across this. There is a lot of interesting new research going on with how to store data using &quot;nano-structures&quot;.  There's also an area of research in quantum databases, which seems like a really interesting database abstraction.
I would be interested in hearing a more informed and complete answer from someone else who is in this field! In fact it might be useful to post this question on another stack exchange site.