• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, January 29, 2021

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%

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.