Data drives business, and your company needs to employ the best database developers you can find.
In a world where competition is growing by leaps and bounds, most companies would have difficulty competing without data. Data helps companies adjust their offerings, predict trends, track customers, clients and products, and makes it much easier to build on existing customer relationships. Additionally, many applications depend on databases to function.
It goes without saying that the business world wouldn't be as agile as it is now without data.
This means your company needs to employ the best database developers (also known as database administrators) you can find. But what qualities should you look for in a good database developer? These are not standard employees or developers, as there are very specific skill sets involved in developing and managing various types of databases.
Outside of the usual list of qualities you should look for in an employee (like solid communication, impeccable work history, ability to take constructive criticism, and teamwork), what should you look for?
High proficiency with data modeling
Data modeling is a very specific skill that makes it easy for database administrators to create a conceptual model of how individual data assets relate to each other. It's easy to forget how complex databases can be, and when countless relationships occur between data sets, this complexity becomes even more challenging.
One of the first skill sets you should look for is high proficiency in data modeling. Your database developers must be able to create these models so that your other developers can use them to create applications that can interact with the data successfully.
Without high proficiency in data modeling, your diverse teams will struggle from the start because databases will not be well defined or structured in a useful way.
Solid understanding of at least one database
When you decide to build an application that depends on a database, one of the first things you must decide is which database to use. Will your application or service work with a relational database, or will it need a document-centric NoSQL database?
Once you've decided on the type, you'll need to narrow it down to a single database management system (such as MySQL, MS SQL, MongoDB, or SQLite).
As you can see, there are many options available. For this, you will need to hire database developers who have a solid understanding of at least one database. Your best bet would be to hire a database developer who is comfortable with at least one relational database and one NoSQL database. If they can work with multiple databases of both types, even better.
Learn how to manage multiple data sources
Your data will come from numerous sources, and your database developers will need to know how to manage these sources so that they can be used not only in the databases being developed, but also by the applications on which those databases will depend.
Your developers will need to know how to connect databases to sources, import data from different sources into databases, and export data from databases. If your developers aren't comfortable managing multiple data sources, your teams will struggle to accomplish any task.
Understand data visualization
Data visualization has become an extremely important area of business intelligence. Data visualizations make it easier for people to consume and understand data. Without data visualization, it would be nearly impossible for anyone outside of database administrators and developers to gather any information from these databases.
This means your database developers will need to know how to use tools like Redash, Charted, Grafana Labs, and Google Charts.
Designing and debugging databases
Creating a database is not easy. Sometimes this data (and the services that store and serve it) can go wrong. And if a database isn't designed well from the start, the problems will be obvious—at least to a very good database developer.
Your database administrators/developers need to be able to not only design a database that works correctly, but also be able to successfully troubleshoot when something goes wrong (which it will).
Database Security
A working database is great. A secure and functional database is even better. You must remember that these databases can contain very sensitive information (such as customer addresses and banking information). You don't want this data to be stolen by hackers.
Because of this, you should hire database developers with a good understanding of security. They need to know how to harden a database and design databases that are not riddled with security holes. Furthermore, they must know how to integrate these databases in a way that does not leave the data open to be captured.
Database Optimization
In addition to being able to build a secure database, your developers also need to be able to create a database that is optimized for the hardware, software, APIs, and applications that will use the data. A poorly optimized database can become a serious bottleneck for your services.
When hiring a new database developer, make sure they have a solid understanding of optimizing data and the database servers that host it.
Conclusion
A good database developer can easily start your project on the right foot. On the contrary, a database developer without the necessary skills can actually hinder progress. Be sure to look for all of the above qualities (along with your regular list of essentials), and your projects will thank you for it.
