Email marketers need data systems that can pull information from anywhere in an organization. And they may be getting them, according to The State Of SQL And BI: The Data Analysts’
Perspective, a study by Ascend2 in partnership with bipp, a business intelligence firm.
Business intelligence (BI) budgets are significantly rising in 49% of companies, and moderately
in 36%. Another 12% say their BI spend remains the same, and 3% are decreasing it.
Of the professionals polled, 75% utilize Structured Query Language (SQL) databases, 57% use Google Analytics
and 46% use Excel sheets.
What do users seek in a BI tool? They want:
- Security — 38%
- Data visualization — 28%
- Data source
connectivity — 19%
- Data modeling language — 19%
- Data preparation — 17%
- Advanced analytics — 17%
- In-database — 16%
- Version control — 16%
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However, analysts and executives view things in slightly different ways.
Executives seek security (29%), reporting & analytics
features (26%) and natural-language query (23%).
The two sides also differ on the challenges they face. For 42%, the top obstacle is quality of IT infrastructure. And 41% say it is data
security. But again, executives and analysts have differing views.
Executives list their challenges as:
- Data security — 55%
- Quality of IT
infrastructure — 39%
- Cloud/browser accessibility — 32%
- Collaboration limitations — 19%
- Mobile accessibility — 19%
- Database connectivity — 19%
- Associated costs/budget — 13%
Analysts disagree. Their major issues are:
- Quality of IT Infrastructure —
42%
- Associated costs/budget constraints — 32%
- Collaboration limitations — 32%
- Mobile accessibility — 30%
- Cloud/browser
accessibility — 28%
- Data security — 22%
- Database connectivity — 16%
In general, 90% agree that their BI platform should include a data
modeling language that allows them to create reusable data models using SQL syntax, with 49% strongly concurring. Another 10% are neutral.
Here are the BI platform features that
respondents expect will have the greatest impact on their programs over the next two to five years:
- Cloud analytics — 21%
- Multi-experience analytics —
18%
- Data literacy — 16%
- Analytics catalog — 16%
- Social analytics — 15%
- Graph analytics — 15%
- Data storytelling
— 15%
- Data and analytics governance — 15%
All that said, here are the useful solutions, as rated by the respondents:
- MySQL — 63%
- SQL Server — 43%
- Oracle — 38%
- SQL Lite — 29%
- Apache Impala — 28%
- BigQuery — 28%
- Apache Spark — 28%
- Athena — 17%
- OD BC — 13%
- Snowflake — 12%
- Redshift — 10%
- PostgreSQL — 8%
- Presto — 7%
- Panoply —
7%
- MongoDB — 7%
- Cassandra — 7%
- MariaDB — 5%
Ascend2 surveyed 218 data professionals.