Data Warehousing for Business Intelligence

I have not taken it but this looks good:

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/data-warehousing

I actually like the idea of building out a sample DW locally using free and open source tools, just to learn the concepts like data modeling and ETL.

Cloud platforms are great but problematic for learning in many ways and also potentially expensive (especially if you fuck up and do something that incurs a large bill).

Opinion on classes?

Techie friends... any opinions on the following classes? To give a little background I am a long time enterprise applications guy (dms, crm, sccm, sql server, etc) and want to move more into the BI/data arena which my type of role is evolving into. I spent some time earlier this year studying data warehouses with a friend who is a master but life got in the way and we had to stop. I was looking at coursera for tracks and found the following. All really interest me.

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/data-warehousing

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/data-analysis

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/big-data

Someone I was talking to thought Big Data would be the best fit for me initially, but I think any of them are natural next steps for me. I'm also taking some other smaller training sessions on the side for stuff like python.

They all start Monday. I just need to decide

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Data Warehousing for Business Intelligence. It is a specialization course on Coursera.

Try here:
https://www.coursera.org/specializations/data-warehousing

It's a good program, and free. The OSSU Free Data Science curriculum uses this for their databases portion. Not JUST SQL but also database architecture and NoSQL (I think they teach Mongo)

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1. You should ask what database the company uses. It can be PostgreSQL, MS SQL, Redshift, and many others. Next, you want to get an IDE to connect to this database. Usually, companies already have preferred solutions (like pgAdmin for the Postgresql database). If there are none I suggest Dbeaver - it's an open-source solution that works with many popular databases
2. I suggest you complete some courses from Coursera. They are usually bigger and gives you a bigger picture. I can recommend this course https://www.coursera.org/specializations/data-warehousing

Thanks. I think this is up my alley.

I guess I don't know -- what i want to do is prepare for an advanced SQL interview, likely working in data science/BI context, similar to your article, and also pick up a bit of what might be useful DBA knowledge (don't want to just learn interview tricks). I'm surprised there isn't a more comprehensive website on SQL specifically, or even Coursera class, though i did find this specialization which looks good: https://www.coursera.org/specializations/data-warehousing

For 'big data' data modeling, these courses seem ok:

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/data-warehousing#courses

https://www.coursera.org/learn/big-data-management#syllabus

Do some light reading on kimball, inmon, star schemas, then watch this: https://info.dataengconf.com/hubfs/SF%2018%20-%20Slides/DE/From%20Flat%20Files%20to%20Deconstructed%20Database.pdf

Data Modeling in the traditional sense of ETL is a dying. Point being your effort may be better spent learning other things.

A certificate is not bad to put on your resume in order to have a jumping off point for discussing your experience, but it definitely won't make you stand out.

If you're interested in business intelligence specifically, I'd recommend the following course:

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/data-warehousing

Don't worry about paying for the cert just do it and then put it on your resume as something to talk about. I know I have referred back to it several times over the years and I'm considering re-taking it.

If you have no SQL experience at all, I'd recommend spending a few days learning the basics first and then trying to tackle the course above.

But more important than any SQL course is learning to "think" in terms of queries As others have said, get some datasets that you're curious about and ask some questions of the data set.

I haven't worked my way through this tutorial, but it looks like a pretty solid introduction to SQL for data analysis, so it may be worth checking out: https://hakibenita.com/sql-for-data-analysis.

Learning SQL for data analysis is not the hard part, learning to think in terms of queries is the hard part.

Thank you for the detailed response! As to your question as to what I want to do, it's hard to fully grasp the roles from the outside, but from your explanations it sounds like somewhere between a report/ dashboard developer and a business analyst. Basically whatever I can leverage my existing knowledge of how businesses run, while avoiding anything I would need to re-learn complex math and statistics. I want my work to be analytical, involved in business decisions, and social where i'm interacting with different groups.

I'll check out that book! I've found two certs from coursera I'm considering which seems to cover a lot of bases of yours and others comments if I enrolled in both of them:

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/data-warehousing

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/excel-mysql?

Maybe take these then enrol in a local institute to leverage networking opportunities?