Data Analyst / Database Developer — Secrets To Shine

As Database Developer, you have to take care of the following things to be comfortable and be successful at work place.

1. What is the mission of the company you are working for? When you join a company or a project, understand the mission and vision of the company and for what purpose they are building this application or how this application add value to the eco system with in the IT infrastructure. Visit the website of the customer, look at various channels with in your reach to understand the mission of the company.
2. Which domain you are going to work in your project? When you are working in a project, you need to understand what is the line of business you are in and how that connects to vision and mission of the organization. Are you working on HR, Finance, SCM, CRM? This will help you to know where the scope starts and where it ends.
3. What is the business problem your application is solving? Are you taking care of customers or products or suppliers or employee related business process? Once you understand the core of your data, then things will start making sense. So, identify what is the CORE of your applicaton and Periphery of your application.
4.  Are you working in new development project or enhancement project? This helps to know how to handle day to day activities. If you are in support project, then you need to understand the SLA (Service Level Agreement) to close your tickets to make sure you are inline with the expectation from the management.
5. Awareness of team structure and to whom you are reporting. Its important to know how your team is structured because, the closer you are with each other, expect less documentation and process in place. If the program / project is Global then more process, Governance and Controls exists. The more the stake holders the time it takes is longer. So, be aware of the reality.
6. How the team moves the code from one environment to other as part of migration? Some times, we think running the code in production is as easy as 1,2,3. I was in a project where they mentioned no matter what there are only 3 pre defined dates are available to roll out the code to production as its a controled environment. So, be aware of checks and balances in your project.
7. How to improve the domain knowledge to enhance the value in the project? Once I asked my boss on how to understand the business better. He took me to the floor where the software we developed was in action. People who can cannot visualize the end user actions / usage of your application, its better to see users in action with your application. How this software helps people / organization either to optimize the work or enhance the opportunity? If you understand and see how this software fits in the big picture then you are good to go. Spend 10% of your time visualizing how business uses your application, then things will fall in place.
8. What is the current Data Model you deal with? As we are seeing a tremendous change in the current landscape of where the data resides, its important to know the type of data and the model they use. If the data is stored in RDBMS and if its operational database, mostly this model is 3rd NF. If the data is used for reporting / analysis purpose your model is denormalized. Typically in DW / analytical projects you will see either Snowflake or Star Schema.
9. What type of database objects they are using the most? Even though you have tables, views, sequences, indexes, mat views, materialize views, procedures, functions etc only few objects are heavily used in certain projects. So, please look into data dictionary and see how many different user objects exists in the schema you use.
10. Information about each table in the project you are dealing with. If you are a developer, knowing the metadata about each table gives you immense knowledge on what you can do with that data. Just by knowing many records you have in the table, indexes exists in that table, constraints you have in the table, PK & FK you will understand the core information and periphery information.
11. List goes on….. but I am sure you will be better than 50% of people in the project if you keep the pointers I mentioned (based on my experience)