Much of the energy from the Microsoft team for database services has been targeted toward the BI solutions since 2008. We’ve seen things such as PowerPivot, data warehouse appliances, Column Stores and much more. Recently we have been seeing some powerful performance enhancements in the SQL database engine as well with in memory tables, and column store indexes.
Still, it seems that the majority of the effort in the SQL Server suite of tools is primarily focused on BI and data mining. This isn’t really a bad thing when you consider that SQL Server is a very mature product, performing just about anything you could want to do. But, a business intelligence tool has many different ways to be enhanced.
The question I am asking myself is should database developers push to transition to BI applications. The database aspects are not all that foreign. Database ETL tools work pretty much the same. But utilizing the contents of a data warehouse is a very different thing. It has completely different syntax. It seems to help if you have different skills regarding statistical analysis, and predictive modeling, etc.
Should a DBA be looking to make the switch? Or is there enough work now and predictably in the future to continue moving forward with OLTP needs? What do you think? Leave a comment or drop an email to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben