Whether a database skill is necessary for being a Business Intelligence professional?

Whether a database skill is necessary for being a Business Intelligence professional?.

Business intelligence has different subarea, i.e. business analysis, ETL, reporting design, etc. There are professionals specialized in each subarea. Which sub area is good to jump into with database skills? And which subarea is the essence of business intelligence ?

Ed Todd • By analogy, do you need to be a mechanic to drive a race car? On the surface, no. But to communicate effectively with the crew (chief, engine bulder, chassis set-up team) and understand the limits of the vehicle you need a certain level of mechanical knowledge.

  The data model (logical and physical views) is the schematic or blueprint for building the database and for navigating it (BI). Done properly, a data model captures the relationships (the how) between the data entities and attributes (the what).

  Data models help the DBA understand things like what data will be joined often, perhaps leading to a decision to de-normalize some data. For the BI user of the data, the model discloses the key structure so you don't write a query that performs full table scans - making you unpopular with the other users of the data infrastructure.

Neil Rivenburgh •  Each of your subareas requires knowledge of data and databases. As Ed mentioned, data modeling is also an important knowledge area. As far as a career specialty, they are all in strong demand now so I would choose the one that you enjoy doing. Building reports and dashboards would be a good area to start in and see how you like it. That is certainly a key component of BI and will give you some exposure to the other areas.

 It depends...if you are technical oriented or business oriented. But, firstly, you should have good understanding of databases, data modelling procedures and how to design and produce reports and dashboard needed by business people.

You definitely need to have database skills in order to be a business intelligence developer/professional. Before you can create a BI model to be able to create reports, you need to understand the relationships between the tables, views, joins etc and the joins. You also need to know how to query a database to create databases, tables, views, stored procedures, functions.summarized or detailed results.

Secondly, you can not create good reports if you can't validate the data the reports are generating, or if you can't create formulas or calculations based on the fields from the database tables. To do all of this you need to know SQL well, then you can move onto to learning the various BI tools.Also to learn how to create Datawarehouses and Datamarts.

Bradley Morris •  An understanding of data models and DB's is a critical skillset in becoming a true BI professional. Without this understanding, it is difficult to understand users and set expectations as a BA, or transform data into information as a report professional or data visualization expert, or manipulate data across sources as an ETL developer. And of course, without DB skills, you can scratch being a data modeler.

Andre Linssen • If you have database skills you can jump into any sub area of BI, but I would like to add that having database skills alone is not enough. The other question was, 'what is essence of BI?' Well, you can buy reporting tools, and hire as much BI consultants as you might think is necessary, but, without a solid data model and a sound data architecture you will only be able to produce BI reports that are remotely attached to reality.

Andreas Krupp • To build on your comment regarding the bridge between business and IT, I would probably add that we even have to think about building bridges between business units in the same company, too. A lot of companies have lost the understanding of end-to-end business processes which is still leading to silo-solutions (in BI or IT in general). And above all, a lot of business people have forgotten that reporting/BI should be part of each and every business process.