If you are looking for Microsoft SQL consulting services, it’s key to identify the right partner for your specific needs. 

Many organizations need help with SQL database operational tasks like performance tuning, troubleshooting database issues, or handling a migration or upgrade. Most SQL consultants offer these services.

But businesses increasingly want to master and move beyond database operational efficiency—to unlock their data’s full potential and deliver the insights that support better, quicker decisions. This takes a specialist SQL consulting services partner that can architect, model, build, manage, and secure big data and data warehouse systems and deliver business intelligence (BI) via user-friendly dashboards. 

What is Business Intelligence?

Data is the starting point for business-critical decisions. Yet study after study finds that very little of the data most companies collect is ever used for analytics. 

Business intelligence (BI) is the process of using technology to analyze data and extract actionable insights that help executives and others make better informed decisions, while also reducing reporting lead time. To make BI possible, data from internal and/or external sources must be prepared for analysis, then queried to yield data visualizations, reports, and dashboards. These tools represent the results to suit different strategic planning and operational decision-making audiences. 

BI Benefits & SQL Consulting Services

Companies exploit BI for a variety of reasons, from streamlining business processes to improving customer knowledge to developing “big picture” perspectives on new market opportunities. Some of the industries where BI is most critical for competitive success include retail, food & beverage, transportation & travel, and energy/oil & gas. 

Benefits that many organizations experience through developing BI capabilities can include:

• Improved customer satisfaction
• Greater employee productivity
• More accurate reporting
• More accurate competitive analysis
• Stronger ability to see and forecast market trends
• Enhanced ability to identify new business opportunities, revenue sources, etc.
• More comprehensive knowledge of business performance
• Better data quality

What is Data Modeling?

Data modeling analyzes data objects and plots how they relate to one another. This process structures the data for BI activities and is a prerequisite step before loading data into a data warehouse or data lake.

Data modeling helps you understand your data and make the best technology decisions to store and manage it. A comprehensive data model is also the basis for developing SQL database applications.

Some of the benefits of data modeling include:

• More efficient database development with fewer errors
• More consistent and complete data documentation, including a data dictionary
• A common language to help data scientists and business teams communicate about BI requirements

A rigorously optimized data model helps eliminate redundancy in your SQL database, which reduces storage needs and supports efficient retrieval. The goal of data modeling is to give the business clean, consistent, structured data that can support BI and achieve consistent, effective results.

SQL consulting services focused on the data modeling process can help accelerate the transformation of a company’s “dark” data into business intelligence. From there, you can readily answer future questions regarding that data—to deliver business value for years to come without the need for extensive SQL coding. 

SQL Consulting Services for Successful BI

SQL Server is a leading platform for data warehousing, analysis, reporting, and BI to make your business more competitive and efficient. But successful BI outcomes depend on clean data, best-practice database maintenance, proactive performance tuning, and expert planning/strategy.

If you don’t have BI expertise in-house, the right SQL consulting services partner can provide specialized solutions like: 

• SQL Server and/or Microsoft Azure SQL architecture 
• SQL Server and/or Microsoft Azure SQL application development
• Big data and data warehouse architecture and interface development
• Extract-transform-load (ETL) process development
• Data analytics queries
• Data reporting tools

What’s Next?

There’s no question that effective BI can improve competitiveness, profitability, and resilience. Yet a very high percentage of BI projects fail or show excessively long time to value. Data quality issues are a common problem, as are inadequate project planning and poor requirements definition.

Engaging a SQL consulting services partner with proven BI expertise and project success can help improve the odds of success for your company’s BI initiative. 

If you are looking for a SQL consultant that can customize their offerings for your needs, objectives, budget, and in-house capabilities, contact Buda Consulting to schedule a free 15-minute call. We can accelerate time to value and reduce business risk on BI projects leveraging Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and other database environments.