Has anyone made the switch from SQL DBA to BI as a career?

• Dan Tan

  Newbie

  Points: 6

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  February 19, 2013 at 2:19 pm

  #268883

  I'm currently a SQL DBA considering shifting into a BI career.

  1) Has anyone else made the switch before? Do you like it? Wish you could go back? Pros/cons? Working conditions different (are you still on call)?

  2) Is anyone working in BI wishing they were a DBA? Is the grass just greener on the other side?

  I guess I'm just about due for a mid-life crisis :unsure: !

  I have a background as an application developer and programmed web applications for about a decade, and everywhere I worked I fell into the "accidental DBA" role. So about 20% of my time was making sure backups were running and DB servers were okay, etc. The company I was with started to outsource more of their I.T., so I then transitioned into a solutions engineer for two years. I loved many aspects of it. Got to evaluate cloud technologies and tech startups, recommended or rejected cloud technologies, ran beta evaluations, and managed an outsourced data center team.

  Towards the end, I got married, had a baby, and decided that a job change would be best for my family life. Managing an outsourced data center that works 3 shifts when I would *like* to only work 1 shift started to wear me down (nothing against the team, they were awesome). I honestly missed the deep technical work, so I jumped into DBA full-time in a new job.

  And now I'm trying to decide whether to stay with SQL DBA and get deeper into the administration side, or move into the BI stack (or maybe get into Sharepoint -- did I mention the midlife crisis? :-D).

  I'm not sure this is the right forum for this post, but the Career forum seemed to have a lot of "how do I pass cert exams" and "I have only read books, how do I get a DBA job?", and that's not where I'm at.

  Any words of wisdom?

  Thanks,

  DT