Microsoft SQL Server is currently leading the RDBMS market with its tremendously diverse tools and services for data analytics. Whether it’s data management, analysis or reporting, you get all in one package, that too for free.
Given that SQL server provides an end-to-end exposure to the whole data ecosystem, learning SQL server is the quickest path to your data analytics journey..
Note: This career advice is for newbies just starting their analytics journey, as well as for technical geeks who wish to opt for SQL server job roles.
Table of contents
- Data Ecosystem and SQL Server Tools
- How can SQL Server help me begin a Career in Data Analytics?
- Career Tracks to target a job role
- Learn SQL Server Tools
- Watch Webinar!
Data Ecosystem and SQL Server tools
Data ecosystem is the backbone of any organization’s data analytics project.
Simply put, a data ecosystem documents and presents infrastructure and applications for data storage and processing.
Any data ecosystem portrays four to five stages of data, depending on the organization’s objectives.
- Starting off, a data expert always needs to collect data from the vast sources of the organization. This includes, website data, SaaS applications, IoT devices, CRM, ERP etc.
- Next, all of the data from diverse sources is gathered over a common place through a process called ingestion.
- Integrated on a single database, this data needs to be cleaned, transformed and organized into a universal format (data harmonization) to avoid misalignment across the ecosystem.
This process is called data warehousing (aka data engineering).
- Optional is to further enrich data using machine learning technology. One of the main data science job roles is to apply predictive analytics at this stage.
- Finally, at the last stage, data is analyzed and presented to business users for value driving and decision making. A BI developer or engineer is specialized to handle data visualization at this stage.
SQL Server tools and services offer a low code environment to all of the above steps and therefore quickly and easily helps to build an end-to-end data ecosystem for an organization.
The tools and services can be broadly classified as data management and business intelligence (BI) functionalities.
- For data management, SQL Server provides SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), SQL Server Data Quality Services, and SQL Server Master Data Services.
- SQL Server provides SQL Server Data tools for building a database. And for management, deployment, and monitoring the platform has SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS).
- SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) handle data analysis.
- SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) are used for reporting and visualization of data.
- Earlier known as the R services, the Machine Learning Services came as part of SQL Server suite in 2016 and renamed afterwards.
How can SQL Server help me begin a Career in Data Analytics?
When you learn SQL Server, it exposes you to the complete data ecosystem. This helps you in your career advancement in two ways.
Access to the vast SQL Server jobs
Microsoft SQL Server currently stands at 3rd rank (after Oracle and MySQL) in the world’s most used commercial relational databases. This is because Microsoft offers an intensely feature-rich version of SQL Server for free.
This makes SQL server skills one of the most in-demand across the data analytics ecosystem.
Tip: For newbies, and those with career transitions, if you want to land on an analytics job quickly, learning SQL server tools is a smart idea since the job market is lucrative.
Further, once in, as you move along in your career we recommend growing your skill set and ascending towards more specific job roles, for example, data engineer and BI developer.
Career Tracks to target a job role
Once you get a grab of the end-to-end data analytics ecosystem, now it’s a step to move forward in your analytics journey.
But why?
Data analytics is a broad field, and carries lucrative job opportunities in the form of various job roles available in the market.
Moreover, given a myriad of job roles, you can opt for a career in the field of your interest.
What are the career tracks when I work with SQL server?
- Become a Data Engineer
Once getting to know what data engineering holds, you can now opt for a vendor specific data engineering skills.
For example, Teradata is a market leader in on-premise data warehousing solutions. Learning data engineering on Teradata will offer bright career prospects in the data analytics field.
While SQL Server and Teradata RDBMS have a data architecture built for small scale data, when it comes to data volumes up to petabytes size, these solutions don’t work.
Thus a data engineer can move to learning big data technology that holds even brighter career prospects (read about the blooming big data market forecast).
- Become a BI Developer/BI Engineer
This job role narrows to the data visualization, and reporting only. A BI developer is expert in BI tools such as Power BI and Tableau.
As a next step, a BI Developer can also opt for no code/low code Data Science using Knime.
- Become an ML Engineer
A Machine Learning engineer uses ML technology to employ predictive analytics and finds out future trends and patterns within data.
The requirement for an ML engineer is to understand how databases and data warehousing works, and needs to build a strong foundation in that.
Next, you can opt for Deep Learning in your career journey for better positions in large enterprises.
- Become a Data Analyst
After getting to work with SQL server tools, you can also opt data analyst as your career choice. This requires you to build expertise in BI tools such as Power BI and Tableau.
The next step for career advancement is to learn Business Analytics that deals with business data and marketing analytics.
You might want to view Business Analytics career prospects and salary in Pakistan.
Interested in Learning SQL Server Tools?
Dice Analytics offers an 8 weeks course* on Learning SQL Server Tools.
The course covers four tools; SQL Server Integrated Services (SSIS), SQL Server Management Services (SSMS), Azure Cloud, and Power BI.
You will learn:
- SQL hands-on
- DWH building using SSIS
- Data Management using SSMS
- AZURE SQL CONFIG, DTU basics
- DAX implementation in Power BI
- Data visualization in Power BI
Visit complete course outline and registration details here.
*We offer flexible pricing and valuable concessions.
Straight from the Horse’s Mouth!
The instructor of this course is Mr. Abu Bakar Nisar Alvi who’s Pakistan’s celebrated engineer awarded Tamgha e Imtiaz (fourth highest civil rank) for his excellent engineering performance back in 2005.
Mr. Alvi serves as a senior IT consultant at the World Bank with key experience in enabling digital transformation as part of the village service delivery in Indonesia.
Taking two decades of experience and vast work diversity, Mr. Alvi is now associated with Dice Analytics as a lead trainer Data Analytics and Visualization.
Webinar: Watch him speaking on ‘Why to Learn SQL Server Tools’ in the latest webinar (LinkedIn Webinar Link).
