Data Warehousing For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter 31. Ten Mandatory Skills for a Data Warehousing Consultant

In This Chapter

• Knowing a little about a lot of data warehousing topics

• Knowing a lot about a few data warehousing topics

• Working well and effectively with the people in your organization

• Having access to up-to-date information

• Using a hype-free vocabulary

A good data warehousing consultant has certain abilities in dealing with people and a knowledge of various aspects of data warehousing. This chapter lets you in on a few required skills that all data warehousing consultants should possess.

Broad Vision

Even a data warehousing consultant who's an expert in a particular area (star schema design in a relational database in support of OLAP functionality, for example) should have a broad vision in at least these areas:

• Overall end-to-end data warehousing architecture, from tools to middleware to data quality to orchestration software

• An understanding of client/server, Web-based, and server-side computing architectures

• A firm understanding of database optimization concepts for tuning data access queries

• Skills in digging through data sources to see what's really there

Because the components of a data warehousing environment are interrelated, a consultant must be able to not only provide technical expertise in one or two areas of a project (as discussed in the following section), but also see the big picture.

Deep Technical Expertise in One or Two Areas

If you're going to pay the big bucks for a consultant who claims to be a data warehousing ...