T-SQL Tuesday #89: The Times They Are a-changing

This months T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Koen Verbeeck (@Ko_Ver) on the topic how the cloud will change and maybe has already changed our jobs as data professionals.
This idea was inspired by Kendra Little’s (@Kendra_Little) blog post Will the Cloud Eat My DBA Job? I listened to the podcast version of her post and here are my 2 cents to the party.

 

Self-Service BI

I believe the first time I encountered fear for losing our jobs started back when Self-Service BI was introduced. Some thought Power Pivot (or PowerPivot or Project Gemini) would lead all us BI people out of jobs. Well, that turned out to be a bit different, didn’t it? I think it gave us new opportunities while business users became more confident with data and creating visualizations themselves. They still needed that single version of the truth to report on, so creating a data model that the business users could use for their SSBI was crucial. Then there are also things like Master Data Services for proper data management or Change Data Capture to decrease the throughput on the systems.
This also holds true with the introduction of Power BI and. I usually don’t see the majority (if any) of the users of an organization creating reports with Power BI. I often create a set of reports and dashboards that (key) users then use and update with changes. There are also others clients that (through corporate policy) require the use of SSRS (or Report Builder), which in my opinion isn’t at all a tool to be used by end/key/business users.

Stay up-to-date

It’s important to keep up with al those new cloudy features and tools. There are tons of blogs out there that write about it. As Koen does, I use Feedly to keep the blogs I like to read sorted and keep track of the ones I haven’t read. That counter usually is a bit higher than 10 :)

You could also opt for certifications to keep yourself up-to-date, although not everyone is in favor of those. Microsoft also recently made a shift towards the cloud with their new and revamped certification tracks like MCSE Cloud Platform and Infrastructure and exams like Designing and Implementing Cloud Data Platform Solutions (70-473) and Designing and Implementing Big Data Analytics Solutions (70-475) that could earn you the MCSE Data Management and Analytics, for which I have my last exam planned for the end of this month.

And of course there are podcasts. I like this way of keeping up with the latest bits and bytes the best. I listen to them when I’m commuting and I believe I follow a bit over a dozen podcasts now, you can read what my favorite podcasts are.

With that, I’d like to thank Koen for hosting and I hope to join the tsql2sday-party more regularly!