🥪 Jaffle Shop Generator 🏭

The Jaffle Shop Generator or jafgen is a python package with a simple command line tool for generating a synthetic data set suitable for analytics engineering practice or demonstrations.

Installation

If you have pipx installed, jafgen is an ideal tool to use via pipx. You can generate data without installing anything in the local workspace using the following:

pipx run jafgen [options]

You can also install jafgen into your project or workspace, ideally in a virtual environment.

pip install jafgen

Use

jafgen takes two optional arguments:

• --years sets the length of time the simulation generates synthetic data for. It defaults to 2.
• --prefix sets a prefix for the generated files in the format [prefix]_[file_name].csv. It defaults to raw.

# generate a simulation spanning 3 years from 2016-2019
jafgen --years 3

Purpose

Finding a good data set to practice, learn, or teach analytics engineering with can be difficult. Most open datasets are great for machine learning -- they offer single wide tables that you can manipulate and analyze. Full, real relational databases on the other hand are generally protected by private companies. Not only that, but they're a bit too real. To get to a state that a beginner or intermediate person can understand, there needs to be an advanced amount of analytics engineering transformation applied.

Approach

Coming soon.

Contribution

Coming soon.