Foundational Infrastructure

Data Engineering & Pipelines — the foundation your AI initiatives are quietly assuming exists.

Most stalled AI projects aren't AI problems — they're data problems discovered in week six instead of week one. We audit, build, and monitor the ingestion, warehouse, and quality-gate layer that makes every other AI initiative possible.

See the case study ↓
99.5%Pipeline uptime*
<1hrData freshness*
100%Schema-contracted
All evals passing
elhaa · data pipeline
1Source Systems
2CDC / Ingestion & Quality Gates
3Governed Warehouse
4AI & BI Consumers
99.5% pipeline uptime
What's included

A complete data foundation, not a one-off export.

Ingestion, schema contracts, quality gates, and monitoring — the full layer that makes AI systems trustworthy downstream.

Source & data-readiness audit

Every source system profiled for volume, structure, and the specific quality issues that would break downstream AI — scored before any pipeline is built.

02

CDC & scheduled ingestion pipelines

Change-data-capture or interval-scheduled pipelines with schema contracts enforced at ingestion, replacing manual exports.

03

Governed warehouse, one definition

A single source of truth AI and BI systems both query — the same number means the same thing everywhere.

04

Automated data-quality gates

Business-rule and schema validation catching bad data before it reaches downstream systems, not after.

05

Freshness, quality & cost monitoring

Live dashboards so a broken feed is caught in minutes and a cost creep is caught before the invoice.

Engineering deep dive

How it's actually built.

The pipeline topology and a real ingestion pattern — not a diagram of generic “data flow.”

1Source Systems (ERP, CRM, Files, APIs)
2CDC / Scheduled Ingestion with Schema Contracts
3Automated Data-Quality Gates (Great Expectations)
4Governed Warehouse → dbt Models → AI & BI
pipeline-job.ts
// elhaa Ingestion Pipeline — Schema-Contracted Job
const job = await elhaaPipeline.run({
  source: 'salesforce.opportunities',
  mode: 'cdc',
  schema: OpportunitySchema,
  qualityGate: 'great-expectations:v2',
  onValidationFail: 'quarantine',
  alertOn: 'failure'
});
Live operations

What you actually see once it's running.

A real monitoring surface, not a promise — freshness, quality, and cost per source, visible at a glance.

elhaa · pipeline health — production

Live
Pipeline uptime99.5%
Quality gate pass99.8%
Avg freshness38 min
Monthly spend$2,140
salesforce.opportunitiesCDC · 12 min agoHealthy
sap.inventory_snapshotBatch · 15 min intervalHealthy
zendesk.ticketsSchema drift detectedReview
stripe.transactionsCDC · 2 min agoHealthy
Case study

From Twelve Spreadsheets to One Governed Warehouse

Retail · Multi-brand e-commerce group

The challenge

Inventory, sales, and customer data lived across twelve spreadsheets and three disconnected systems — no AI initiative could get off the ground because nobody trusted a single number, and the finance and ops teams routinely reported different revenue figures for the same week.

The approach

We audited every source, built CDC ingestion pipelines with schema contracts into a single warehouse, layered in automated data-quality gates, and stood up monitoring so a broken feed is caught in minutes rather than discovered at month-end.

12 spreadsheets + 3 systems → CDC ingestion → quality gates → governed warehouse → dbt models → single source of truth
12→1Sources consolidated
99.5%Pipeline uptime
3wkTo first trusted dashboard

*Illustrative example based on a representative engagement.

The difference

The typical approach vs the elhaa approach.

Typical approach
With elhaa
Foundation
AI project discovers a data problem mid-build, at the worst possible time
Data readiness scored before a single model is chosen
Ingestion
One-off scripts and manual CSV exports nobody trusts
CDC or scheduled ingestion with schema contracts enforced at the door
Storage
The same number means three different things in three tools
One governed warehouse — a single definition, everywhere
Failure mode
A feed silently breaks; someone notices in a monthly report
Broken feed pages an engineer inside minutes, not weeks
How the engagement runs

Four steps from audit to a maintained pipeline.

1

Source & quality audit

Every source system profiled for volume, structure, drift, and the specific quality issues that would break downstream AI.

2

Architecture design

Warehouse or lake design sized to real volume and access patterns, with schema contracts defined per source.

3

Build, backfill & validate

Ingestion pipelines stood up with automated data-quality gates, and historical data backfilled with full validation.

4

Monitor & hand over

Freshness, quality, and cost dashboards live from day one, with documentation your team can operate without us.

How success is measured

Agreed in week one, on a dashboard by go-live.

Reliability

Pipeline uptime

Scheduled jobs completing successfully, tracked and alerted like any other production system.

Quality

Data quality gate pass rate

Share of records passing schema and business-rule checks before reaching downstream systems.

Freshness

Time to availability

How quickly new data becomes queryable after it's created upstream — per source, not averaged.

Cost

Storage & compute spend

Warehouse and pipeline costs tracked weekly against a forecast, with alerts before overruns.

Works with your tools

Typical systems & standards.

Snowflake & BigQuerydbtAirflow & DagsterFivetran, Airbyte & CDCPostgres & pgvectorGreat ExpectationsAWS / Azure / GCP data services
Who's involved

Small teams on both sides.

From elhaa
  • Data engineerBuilds ingestion, CDC, and transformation pipelines.
  • Data architectOwns the warehouse/lake design, schema contracts, and access model.
  • Analytics engineerBuilds the dbt transformation layer AI and BI systems both query.
From your side
  • Data ownerApproves access and retention policy for each source system.
  • System ownersProvide access and context for the source systems being ingested.
  • IT / securityReviews the warehouse security, access model, and data residency.
FAQ

Questions about Data Engineering & Pipelines.

Because most stalled AI projects aren't AI problems — they're data problems discovered too late. We'd rather surface that in a week-one audit than watch a pilot fail in month three.

No — we typically work alongside a data team that's stretched thin, or stand up the first version of this for a team that doesn't have one yet. Full handover, including runbooks, is standard.

Most business reporting and RAG use cases are well served by scheduled batch or CDC on a short interval. True streaming (sub-second) is a real but much rarer requirement — the source audit tells us honestly which one your use case needs, rather than defaulting to the more expensive option.

Yes. We design the warehouse layer to serve both AI systems and existing BI/reporting tools through the same governed models, so you're not building two parallel data stacks.

A focused first pipeline (one or two source systems) typically ships in 3–6 weeks; a full warehouse migration is scoped separately based on volume and source count.

That's the normal starting point, not a blocker. The audit quantifies exactly how messy, and prioritises cleanup where it actually affects the AI use case you care about — not everything at once.

Sounds like your situation?

A 30-minute call. We'll tell you honestly whether this is the right solution — and what it would take.

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