Introduction to Career in Data Warehousing
With the tremendous growth of data in the past years, there is a need to organize this data so as to extract valuable information from it, which calls for data warehousing. There are a lot of opportunities in the market to build a Career in Data Warehousing as most of the companies nowadays deal with data.
Data Warehousing consists of the following:
Data Cleaning
Data consolidations
Data warehousing is like creating a warehouse of the data from different sources that may be structured or unstructured generally from ad-hoc requests which help in decision making and also helps in deriving analytical insights.
Education Required to Build Career in Data Warehousing
- To build a career in data warehousing a data warehouse engineer should have a bachelor’s degree in Computer science, information technology, data science/statistics or any other related field. Prior working experience equivalent of the same is also acceptable.
- To build a career in data warehousing a data warehouse engineer should have minimum 2 years of experience in SQL server coding and SQL server administration. He/she should also have good knowledge of server integration and knowledge of ETL tools.
- To build a career in data warehousing a data warehouse engineer should also have a good understanding of dimensional modeling and other data warehousing techniques. Good knowledge of setting up cross-functional and relational databases. Not only ETL the candidate should also have knowledge of Tableau or any other analytics platform (SpagoBI)
- To build a career in data warehousing a data warehouse engineer must possess very good skills in using Ms Word, PowerPoint, Ms Excel, MS Project, MS Visio, and MS Team Foundation Server which will help him/her to create good data designs and also help in creating good documents and reporting process across various business modules
- To build a career in data warehousing a data warehouse engineer should be able to diagnose complex data warehouse processes , business logic failures and data flow issues and for this he/she should be proficient in analyzing and debugging SQL queries and should also be proficient in any of the scripting languages like python, C sharp, Perl, R etc.
- To build a career in data warehousing a data warehouse engineer must have good interpersonal skills and should be open-minded and welcome any changes, he/she should be self-motivated, he/she should be proactive and go beyond the call of duty
- To build a career in data warehousing a data warehouse engineer should have very good people skills, should be able to build strong meaningful and last relationships with others in the company. He/she should be approachable so that .he/she can give their insights with the collaborating personnel or the senior management.
Career Path
There are generally two kinds of databases one is OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) Database and the other is traditional relational database designs known as OLTP (Online Analytical Transaction Processing).
Data warehousing comes under the data engineering oriented path and below gives a brief set of courses that help one to build a successful career in data warehousing and also to become a data warehouse specialist.
For beginners one must be well acquainted with the terminologies of the data warehousing world and for the one can go through the below link which gives a brief summary of the terminologies that are used in real world.
http://www.sqlbootcamp.com/how-to-become-a-data-warehouse-architect/
The go-to path to becoming a data warehouse engineer is to take up a computer course in a University which specializes in database management and database administration. The candidate should be good with computers and should efficiently handle humongous data sets.
Nowadays there are multiple there are multiple training programs and part-time courses which one can take to become a data warehouse engineer. These are generally for the working professionals who are searching for a switch (change of job/career path). For candidates like this, they should be open to learning new technologies as these keep on a chance from time to time.
Some of the top schools in data warehousing/database administration are as follows
- Chicago, Illinois, DePaul University‘s College of Computing and Digital Media
- John’s University in Queens, New York
- Pace University in New York, New York
- Arkansas State University in Jonesborough, Arkansas
Application Areas of data warehousing
Wherever data is used in an industry/company it calls for Industry data warehousing and few of the application areas of data warehousing are as follows:
Let’s look at few of them:
- In the banking industry, data warehousing is used in risk management, as well as analyzing consumer data, market trends and importantly in decision making ( particularly in loan departments).
- In finance industry data warehousing is used to analyze customer expense pattern thereby maximizing the profit of clients.
- In healthcare industry data warehousing is used segregate patients data so that it can be given to insurance companies when asked for. It also helps to keep track of employee records and financial transactions safe.
- In insurance industry data warehousing is used for analyzing data patterns and customer trends to prepare tailor-made policies for customers (custom made policies for each individual customers).
- In the services sector, data warehousing is used for maintaining customer profiling, resource management revenue patterns and financial records.
- In transportation industry data warehousing is used for storing and maintaining crew data on board and storing the financial records for pricing strategies. This also stores customer data so as to allow campaigners to experiment their market strategy with a bunch of customers.
Salary (US data and not India specific figures)
Depending on the educational qualification and experience below table shows the salary that a data warehouse engineer will get.
| Education | Experience | Salary in USD |
| Associate’s Degree | <1 | $148,511-$157,815 |
| Associate’s Degree | 3-4 | $149,200-$158,332 |
| Associate’s Degree | 5-6 | $150,062-$158,849 |
| Associate’s Degree | 7-9 | $151,440-$159,883 |
| Bachelor’s Degree | <1 | $150,062-$158,849 |
| Bachelor’s Degree | 3-4 | $150,751-$159,366 |
| Bachelor’s Degree | 5-6 | $151,440-$159,883 |
| Bachelor’s Degree | 7-9 | $152,819-$160,745 |
| Master’s Degree or MBA | <1 | $151,440-$159,883 |
| Master’s Degree or MBA | 3-4 | $152,129-$160,228 |
| Master’s Degree or MBA | 5-6 | $152,819-$160,745 |
| Master’s Degree or MBA | 7-9 | $154,025-$161,778 |
| JD,MD,PhD or Equivalent | <1 | $152,819-$160,745 |
| JD,MD,PhD or Equivalent | 3-4 | $153,336-$161,261 |
| JD,MD,PhD or Equivalent | 5-6 | $154,025-$161,778 |
| JD,MD,PhD or Equivalent | 7-9 | $155,231-$162,640 |
Conclusion or Career Outlook
What makes data warehousing a field to look after is that in the past only big companies used to use data for predicting the company’s growth but with the advancements in the field of computing (like AWS, Hadoop etc) even smaller emerging companies are able to leverage this practice and hence the need of data warehouse engineer demand grew exponentially. Nowadays without proper analysis, a company is lost in the marker and if an analysis is the heart of the company then data is the blood.
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