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What skills does a BI developer need? A business intelligence (BI) developer needs a broad range of skills ranging from requirements analysis, data modelling, ETL, and report development to cloud skills. A BI developer’s role is to create reports and dashboards. There are two types of BI developers, report creators and full-BI-stack developers. A report creator works with a BI tool to create reports and dashboards. In addition, a full-BI-stack developer also works with the underlying database and ETL. This article gives an overview of the skills needed to be a successful BI developer.
Table of contents
Report Creator skills
Firstly, a BI developer needs to gather and understand the requirements for the report. Secondly, they will need to model the report’s data. This can be done in either a BI tool or a relational database, depending on how complicated the report’s data model is. The final step is to create the report. A report developer can use a BI tool of choice or their organisation’s preferred BI tool.
Two of the most popular BI tools that reports creators use are:
Requirements Analysis
Understanding what your client wants from a report is one of the most critical aspects of a BI developer. Taking the time to get this first step right is essential. A BI developer can use several techniques to work out the purpose of a report. These range from wireframing, prototyping and workshops. Playing back the final design to the client will ensure what has been designed is what the client wants. If you get this wrong, there could be implications to the data model, how the data is stored, etc.
Data Modeling
A BI developer must model the data the report will use. Most importantly, a BI developer’s role is to take the requirements gathered in the Requirements Analysis phase and model these. Firstly, do common facts and dimensions exist in existing data models or do these need to be created? Secondly, what new measures need to be designed to meet the requirements? Thirdly, is there a requirement to link to other datasets to allow an end-user to understand the report better? Finally, what are the specific physical model requirements that the model needs to adhere to? Please refer to why do I need to learn data modelling for a deeper explanation of data modelling.
Report Development
Report development is often assumed to be a simple and easy skill. Yes, it can be easy to create a report, especially with today’s BI tools, but subtleties are often not understood or not considered upfront. The most important aspect of report development is meeting the reporting requirement clearly and giving the user exactly what they need. In addition, presenting visually appealingly reports makes it easier for the user to interpret the data. The layout of visuals on a report or dashboard takes time and understanding. Careful consideration is needed to present data much like a story to allow users to navigate and explore the data being shown intuitively.
Full-BI-Stack skills
As the name implies, a full-BI-stack developer works with all layers of the BI stack from the data warehouse through to the reports and dashboards. A full-BI-stack developer does everything a report creator does, plus they model and create the ETL layer of the data warehouse.
Database
Working with databases is an essential skill for a BI developer. A BI developer needs to create database tables, views, and stored procedures. In addition, understanding and writing complex SQL queries is a vital skill. When it comes to tuning a report that uses a database directly, a BI developer needs to know how the database processes SQL queries efficiently. It takes time to build up strong database skills for BI development.
ETL Skills
Extract, transform and load (ETL), as the acronym implies, is the process of loading data from applications or third-party systems into a data warehouse. The raw data from the source application is transformed into the target data model. ETL is a very mature methodology for efficiently populating data warehouses. Several powerful ETL tools are available with extensive support for on-premise and cloud applications.
Additional Skills
Along with report creator and full-BI-stack skills, a BI developer should develop additional skills to be a well-rounded BI developer. For example, data engineering, project management, and cloud have become increasingly critical skills for a BI developer to learn.
Data Engineering
A Data Engineer has similar skills to BI developers, except they don’t focus on creating reports. Instead, they are more focused on data ingestion and data processing. They use a combination of programming and APIs skills to achieve this. Data engineering is an evolving profession dealing with the complexity of combing and integrating data from legacy and cloud applications. As a result, these skills are becoming more and more critical to BI developers.
Project management
Project management skills are an asset to anyone working with data, regardless of their role. If you are a BI developer on a large project, you will need project management skills. From a project team members’ perspective, knowing where you are in a project, what time has been allocated to the current task you are working on, if you are on track or not is of vital importance. Too often, BI developers who work directly for companies get too caught up in either technical challenges or requirements creep and forget basic project management skills. As a BI developer, you need to fully understand the project you are part of and your deliverables and milestones.
Cloud
Increasing, in today’s world, a BI developer now needs cloud skills. Whether a BI developer is working on AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, they will need to know and navigate the various cloud services a BI developer uses. They will need to be comfortable with cloud storage, lighter integration services and BI cloud services. Focusing on cloud certification is a good move if you are looking to get ahead in your career.
Conclusion
As you have seen, there are several skills a BI developer needs to master to be a successful BI developer. Above all, the most import is to understand the report’s requirements and present the report simply and intuitively. Full-BI-stack skills are in high demand and are a significant next step for creating reports. The additional skills such as Project Management and Cloud skills give a BI developer an advantage and will aid in faster career development.
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