Let's look day in the life of a Data Engineer in 2016.
Wait a minute, the title is 'BI Developer' or 'BI Engineer', but you do pretty much everything from extracting the data to creating the reports for the customers (for better or worse, enjoy it), and of course everything in between.
You start your day investigating why processing of Analysis Services cubes has failed overnight (yes it takes that long) and customers cannot see the latest data in the Excel pivot table (which reads from the cube).
Then, you get an email generated by SQLServer (sp_send_dbmail
) showing that some data check has failed (yes you build a HTML table in an email and send it from the database).
Next, tempdb suddenly starts chocking so you check sp_who2 to see who runs the most bizarre query and reach out to them via Lync (?) to suggest some ways to modify your query. Or is because your 2000-line stored procedure scheduled in SQL Agent is misbehaving?
After lunch, you're fighting with a bunch of SSIS packages, upon opening which your screen freezes for a good 5 seconds. Red icons ❌ on top of tasks are bad, ✅ are pure bliss.
You're trying to build a rudimentary transformation in C# in one of the 'Script tasks'. Talk about coding without an IDE.
Next, you're adding @@rowcount
to one of your stored procedure to print nicely how many rows have been inserted.
Before you leave, you get a message about an SSRS report that you've just built, need to adjust a couple of e-mail subscriptions. Done - this report will be sent to your customers weekly Mondays at 9 AM.
Some things about these past days that I miss, and other not so much.
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