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Have You Started Business Intelligence-Type Work Yet?

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Have You Started Business Intelligence-Type Work Yet?
This seems to be the direction of the more traditional DBA. I’ve been hearing more and more about "administrative" DBAs starting to dive into the analytics and application support roles – where they can help in the design and performance tweaking stuff of running a server. I think a lot of people see the "data uses" direction as the natural add-on skill set for what has traditionally been an administrative (backups, performance, etc.) role for DBAs for SQL Server.

I think this is a good thing – as SQL Server brings more and more policy-based management, more automation and more built-in best practices to running a SQL Server system, you’ll find you have more time to, frankly, do things that have a daily impact on the business. You can learn about how information is accessed, then design better ways – faster ways – to get at that information. Tools to access it (Excel, Access, reporting, etc.) – and more comprehensive controls.

I have to say – I think this is pretty cool, really. If you think about the repetitive tasks of running a server today – if those could be automated and report back when things have issues, it would allow you to be more involved in some killer business-management and integration assistance.

I’m a data designer/data learning guy at heart – how is the information used, how is it accessed, and how is it protected, etc. Those are the things that I really think give a lot of leverage to the use of information and accessing databases. I think this trend (which, of course, isn’t the ONLY trend), is a good thing and lets you really have a strong position as a contributing, clearly needed and beneficial contributor.

I think it’s a good thing.

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