I am writing this post for all future junior DBA’s/BI’s, to inform them what to expect when you choose for a job in SQL DBA/BI.
I started working about a month ago with KOHERA which is a part of the CRONOS group in Belgium. We specialize in BI / DBA consultancy, with many different customers.
My first 2 weeks I had a lot of studying to do, I got a course on SSIS packages & Transact-SQL from Microsoft, and hence got my introduction with the AdventureWorks2012 sample database. These courses were very interesting and easy to follow with the course manual. I learned a lot more from SQL in these 2 weeks with the manual then in my 3 year education in IT.
After these 2 weeks I got the opportunity to start working with a MS PDW 2012. Most of you will not know what a PDW is but i’ll explain this in the next part of my post.
As you know BIG DATA is one of the new things people want to say that they are working with, but what is BIG Data exactly….
It is not just a big dataset of several TB :this is many data, the most important thing that defines BIG DATA is that it is unstructured unaltered data. An example is data from social media, unstructured corporate data, machine and sensor data, … ( read Mark Stacey’s blog for more information http://markgstacey.net/)
Now that we know what Big Data is, we need a system which can work with this big unstructured datasets, and this is where PDW steps in. PDW is a Massivly Parallel Processing database which makes query’s on these datasets become fast (f.e. Normal SMB database query on dataset 1Hour will be 3 minutes on PDW after configuration).
MS PDW is not the only one out there who uses the MPP but since I work with MS PDW, I will be talking more about my experiences with the PDW in future posts.