up vote 7 down vote favorite

I've had a conversation with one or two of the folks at the DBA site about merging Business Intelligence into that site. I've just put a question up on the DBA meta site as well, link here.

The folks at DBA are quite keen on the idea of explicitly including business intelligence topics into the scope of the site. The site is also getting some momentum, and buy-in from the SO and SF mods. I think that it's probably the best avenue to set up a SE forum where B.I. questions are likely to get answered without getting lost in the noise.

Does anyone have strong or even cogent opinions about merging this site into the DBA site, which is (depending on who you ask) more of a generalised database design, development and administration site rather than pure database administration.

share
I wonder if the downvoter would do us a favour and answer with their reasoning behind the downvote. I've got positive feedback, mostly on the meta.dba question, so I'm in the market for a dissenting opinion. – ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells Dec 22 '11 at 19:57

4 Answers

up vote 6 down vote accepted

DBAs has gone a long way to welcome BI questions in the past few months. Closing this proposal as a duplicate of that - no sense in making folks wait to ask these questions!

share
up vote 3 down vote

I agree that many questions do overlap with DBA topics, but many do not. For example, in the BI environment I work in, a database is only a small part of the larger picture. Data can be sourced from multiple files such as an Excel file, then brought into a DB environment, but ultimately is consumed from an end user perspective in something like Cognos Analysis Studio. If I start asking questions about anything but the SQL piece of it, the DBA community is not going to provide much assistance I would think.

Things I don't think would be of particular interest to the DBA community that I am interested in from a BI perspective:

  • WebFocus
  • CliqView
  • Cognos
share
There is a known issue with the naming of dba.se that gets wrangled about on a semi-regular basis. The remit of the site is more 'advanced database topics' than database administration per se, although database administration is a part of the whole picture. A part of the dicsussion I've been having with the dba.se mods is to explicitly broaden the remit to including reporting and OLAP tools such as Cognos or CliqView. – ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells Jan 12 '12 at 23:52
Right on, if broadening dba.se is within the scope, I'm all for the merge. My thought process was more of "if I asked one of my DBAs any question about Cognos or Cliqview - they would look at me like 'go away'" :) – dpollitt Jan 13 '12 at 0:11
@dpolitt - there's an ongoing debate on meta.dba.se about the name and it does confuse people who see SQL development questions migrated there. The current state of play is that nobody can think of a name that isn't significantly worse than dba.se in some respect, and the general plan is to just wait and let understanding build - essentially the problem is one of brand recognition. – ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells Jan 13 '12 at 9:58
up vote 2 down vote

I have noticed lately that the community at SO has become more diligent about moving database-related questions into the DBA community (except of course when they relate more to the programming layer of a multi-tier DB application). So I think that if BI became part of the DBA community, it would reap the benefits of that growing traffic and contribute to a more active site for both communities.

Now that so many enterprise RDBMS suites ship with some kind of BI solution in the box, it is quite common for DBAs to have at least some knowledge of BI, and vice versa. So on the whole, I don't see any negative aspects to this proposed merger.

share
up vote 2 down vote

some general thoughts ...

For keeping BI separate:

The following are really only of interest to BI people

  • end user tools (CliqView, A la Carte, Cognos, SSRS, etc)
  • ETL tools
  • OLAP dbs and query tools
  • MDM incorporation
  • requirements analysis and functional design

For incorporating BI and DBA groups:

  • Neither may get enough support to succeed, so we will both lose out
  • The DB design and efficiency aspects are very similar
  • discussions over Inmon, Kimball, Data Vault could be richer with DBA input

I think I lean towards incorporation, but I guess as long as the remit of DBA site was widened to include the above list of aspects of BI, which are quite critical in my mind.

share
have just read the link which does a lot of justice to merging ... meta.dba.stackexchange.com/questions/503/… – Marcus D Feb 28 '12 at 11:17
it's got a fair bit of support amongst the regulars on dba.se, and the volume of traffic on dba.se is starting to pick up significantly, suggesting that it's going places. The decision is pretty close to being finalised. – ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells Feb 28 '12 at 13:41
It's also worth noting that the DBA site does cover advanced database development topics and there's quite a bit of wrangling going on about the confusion generated by the name. – ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells Feb 28 '12 at 13:42
btw, quite a few of the regulars on dba.se are from London and surrounds - in fact one of the mods lives quite close to me and I just lent him one of the HPs and a disk array. We did a meetup towards the end of last year - if we do another you should come along. Can't remember if I gave you my mobile number or not. – ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells Feb 29 '12 at 18:05

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged