[dba-SQLServer] Hello Again

Billy,

  I see, sir, that you are mistaken.  You have the impression that I know 
what I am doing :-)

I'll tell you how I got this job, but it may not be representative.  I saw 
this advertised almost under the radar, so I wasn't competing against 
monster.com or recruiting agencies.  I sent my resume, but they originally 
refused to give me an interview, as most of my work was in Access, and 
they didn't think I had the SQL Server experience.  I wrote back with a 
two page defense of my abilities and the reasons I did most of my work in 
Access, and they liked my perserverance and interviewed me.  I was able to 
convince them that even though I didn't have data warehousing experience, 
I had the abilities to learn quickly and would be a good addition to the 
company.

I still know very little data warehousing theory, beyond knowing what 
things like a star schema is.  I am still getting used to the tables here. 
 Fortunately, I am being eased into this, and though I am being given 
primary responsiblity for the data warehouse, there are others here with 
experience to help.  On a very basic oversimplified level, you can think 
of OLAP as just denormalizing and archiving your OLTP tables.  Previous to 
this job, I didn't have much experience with large data sets, and I am 
still getting used to the issues in working with those.  It helps that 
much of the framework of the warehouse is already built.  As far as 
building cubes, Cognos takes care of that itself.  One of the other 
programmers here says I should learn the theory, but it's something I can 
do over time and I'm not going to be handicapped in my day to day work 
right now not knowing much OLAP theory.

Even though you don't have OLAP experience, you may also be able to find a 
job in the field.  There's also a lot of theory for Relational dbs, but 
how much of it do you use or even recall?  You may study a lot in the 
beginning, but over time you just find yourself doing it.

Good luck.   Hope this helps.

dba-sqlserver-bounces at databaseadvisors.com wrote on 07/27/2005 01:34:19 
PM:

> Hi Mark:
> 
> Welcome back.  I am hoping to make a similiar transition as you did 
(going 
> from OLTP to data warehousing).  Do you have any recommendations for 
someone 
> hoping to make the same transition? 99% of my work experience comes from 

> OLTP; not sure how that can help me look for a job in the DW world.
> 
> I'm keeping my fingers crossed.  I am currently going through a few 
books I 
> bought on DW and data mining.  Some of the DW books I read (published in 

> late 90s) I am not sure if the DW principles are still relevant today 
since 
> the introduction chapter would say something about how the DW market is 
> still maturing (eg. the last paragraph of the introduction chapter in a 
book 
> called "the data warehouse toolkit").
> 
> Billy
> 
> 



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