Continuing with my thoughts on skills you may wish to acquire this year I started thinking about the skills used by a Database Architect (DBA). Previously we looked at skills for the production DBA, those people who keep the lights on, and the data pure.
A Database Architect, in contrast, is more focused on the actual schema of the data. That includes how tables and relations are defined, database security for connection and data access, data flow, connectivity, and integration with other systems.
You’ll want to know how to build data warehouse schemas. Often this includes traditional Star or Snowflake schema designs. It may mean you have proficiency on sharding and data duplication for distributed processing. With all of the power in Azure you are probably going to want to know how to include Cloud resources. Machine Learning may be significant for you. Integration of data mining languages such as R are growing in adoption.
While you are working on data mining, it is a good time to learn how to use the data mining tools built in to SQL Server Analysis Service. There are a number of different kinds of queries that a Database Architect could use to build data mining models, using the data warehouse as a source. You would want to understand how to write data mining queries, and automate their execution.
Master Data Management, built on top of SQL Server, has been around for a while, and continues to extend its capabilities, helping you maintain the purity of your data.
I hope your schedule is filling up for the year. There’s plenty more to consider. I’ve just looked at a few from the Microsoft Stack.
Cheers,
Ben