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The SQL Server Profession Fork in the Road

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The SQL Server Profession Fork in the Road
JD
writes: "In your analysis of the two forks you talked a bit about DBA involvement under the covers with SharePoint. While I do think this is very important (I found the “self-managing and don’t require a DBA” quote truly laughable), I think you’re missing a large point which probably needs to be expanded on in your second fork.

I’m a database guy from way back, and I have moved into the role of SharePoint Practice Lead at my consulting company. I’ve seen this as a very natural move given the fact that SharePoint is… a database. Specifically, it is a database for all those things that we database experts have historically lumped into the “Unstructured Data” category and done our best to ignore if we could get away with it (Documents, Ad-Hoc Spreadsheets, pictures, etc.). The SharePoint organization of these into Sites and lists with metadata fields and views maps quite nicely to Databases, Tables, Columns, and queries. Once you get past the details of the interface, it’s all fairly intuitive for someone with database experience.

However, where I see most SharePoint installations get out of hand is where they have been set up and organized by people without these skills. In SharePoint, as with any other database system, how you structure, organize, and link your data is absolutely key to being able to use it in a realistic manner. Many of the data access and structural issues I see in SharePoint sites would have been obvious and easily avoided by a good database analyst. Extremely simple things, like defining a key to the data, are routinely missed. On a more advanced level, once you start adding in Forms data collection and BDC (Business Data Catalogs) to tie back to other external database, the need for a unified view of the data, both inside and outside of SharePoint, is absolutely essential.

For the SharePoint clients I work with, I push very hard to get the DBAs and analysts involved as early and often as possible in order to use their expertise and company knowledge at the beginning of the process and to hopefully prevent the train wreck when, inevitably, the data worlds of SharePoint and their other line of business systems collide.

Therefore, not only do I believe that there is great opportunity in the design and organization of SharePoint for people with data analyst skills, I believe that these people ignore the inner structure and data of SharePoint in their organization at their peril."