The cloud and data industry is very competitive, so if you wish to have a successful data warehouse (DW) career, you need to make sure you have the right set of skills – and that these skills are reflected well on your CV.
What is a data warehouse?
Oracle defines a data warehouse as “a data management system designed to enable and support business intelligence (BI) activities, especially analytics. Data warehouses are solely intended to perform queries and analyses and often contain large amounts of historical data. The data within a data warehouse is usually derived from various sources such as application log files and transaction applications.”
As you can see, the data warehouse allows businesses to extract valuable insights from their data to power their decision-making. It also helps to create vital historical records for business analysts and data scientists.
What are the critical data warehouse (DW) roles?
Two prominent roles are associated with data warehousing: data warehouse analyst and data warehouse developer.
A data warehouse analyst collects, analyses, mines and helps businesses make sense of the information they have stored in their data warehouse.
Data warehouse developers are tasked with developing the architecture and designing and implementing the data warehouse environment, including creating data models.
Top skills needed for a career in data warehousing
The six most commonly sought-after skills in the world of data warehousing are:
#1 Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence (BI) is the technology-driven process used to analyse data and create dashboards and reports that show a company’s key performance indicators (KPIs). BI is important as it drives better decisions allowing companies to gain an advantage over their competitors.
#2 ETL
ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) is the process used to extract the data from various sources to load it into the data warehouse. Successful ETL and data integration processes are crucial to business success as they allow all of a company’s data to be brought into one unified view.
#3 Python
Python is one of the most widely used programming languages in data analysis, wrangling and visualisation. Data warehouse developers can also use it to help them automate some of the recurring tasks associated with building a data warehouse.
#4 Relational Cloud Database
A relational cloud database is a cloud-native data warehouse designed to be elastic and scalable – so it can grow or shrink as the business needs. It can also manage multiple data sources and use cases through a unified interface for analysing and querying data. One of the most well-known relational cloud databases is Snowflake.
#5 Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)
The software development life cycle (SDLC) is the framework used to define the steps involved in software development at each phase – including building, deploying and maintaining the software. This process focuses more on data than software for a data warehouse developer.
#6 SQL
Developers use the SQL programming language to store, manipulate and retrieve data from the data warehouse to reduce data storage costs and improve query performance.
Data warehouse jobs are more in demand than ever, so the experienced Agile Recruit team will find the right DW role for you. We can also help companies looking for the right data warehousing people to fill your open roles.
