| December 2006 |
| By Sachin Kumar Chander |
I am a Data warehouse consultant. When I mention it to some people, they think I work in a warehouse and sometimes are curious to know how big it is. They look at me like I did well to get that job after I mention some figure in Terabytes. Well, I wouldn't blame them for thinking that I'm a warehouse loader. It 'is' sort of like a warehouse, but the difference is, the targeted departments or organization's whole historical activity is at my finger tips. With a well implemented DataMart, the managers can create all kinds of fancy reports that will help them give tactical or strategic direction to their business units. For example, a bank manager can tell how much business each region is getting based on demographics, income groups, age, gender and any other parameter you can think of. Again, the key word is historical research of the data. As you can imagine, it benefits an organization immensely as it helps make sense of the numbers they hear about all the time.
My daily duties are never the same. I design the data extraction, transform and load routines, and I develop them using either some tool or a programming language or script that the organization prefers, or a combination of all of these. Not to mention, I have my dose of coffee to help me stay alert while I'm taking care of them. My other duties include, creating documentation, interfacing with other team members and supervisors, conducting tests of my "data" warehouse batches, talking to users and business analysts, database administrators, server administrators, technical infrastructure coordinators, and a whole lot more. The thing I like about this work is that it gives me an insight into the inner workings of the businesses. The most important thing I’ve learned is the impact just one erroneous information can have on the numbers that are churned out.
Are you the one?
The technical skill sets that a data warehouse consultant should have is a thorough knowledge of the databases being used, the operating systems being used, any script that would be used to write code, and the programming language of choice. And not to forget, the data warehouse tool that the organization is using. A thorough knowledge of the tool will help in aligning the technology seamlessly with each other to accomplish the ETL tasks. Most common are, UNIX shell scripts, DOS batch script, advanced SQL skills along with tools such as DataStage and Informatica.
In addition, you will need a keen sense of observation to notice fine details or mismatches in the numbers. An ability to do analysis work will help too, although you will likely have separate analysts in the team who will create the technical specifications and the mapping documents so you can use them to write your code.
If you happen to be involved in the production support role, you will need extra great debugging skills and the ability to get to the root cause - at least escalate it, if not solve it quickly. You will be interacting heavily with angry users who are not able to view their important reports on time, and you need to have the people skills to handle such scenarios.
A new comer will love the challenges and the excitement of working on projects that are critical to the health of the organization. It will most likely be a fast paced project as most ETL projects are. But depending on the client, some can be a bit more easy on your personal life as well. You will enjoy working with multiple technologies and teams at the same time. Although, if you are beyond the phase of problem solving, it will mostly be a tough ride unless you are the relative of the boss or a smooth talker.
Enjoy the exposure and the gratification of providing something to the manager. Keep an eye on what the user really wants is also a good property to have. The smile on your users' face after they use the data you helped provide is a great motivation in itself.
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