The Data Warehouse, a work in progress

Last Friday Petter left the company and the Data Warehouse. He is one in a line of very talented youngster who over the years  have been working with and developed the Data Warehouse. When Ulf Davidsson and I 2001 created the Data Warehouse I know it was going to make an impact on the company, but I did not anticipate the success it has become. And this is much due to the great guys who replaced me and Ulf, we did a decent job too, but that is another post/story.

Camilla was the first one to join us. At the job interview she claims I said ‘If you do not know SQL well, you will be smoked. By the way we have a little test for you, you have these tables, now a production planner wants to see the weekly  consumption of components from warehouse XYZ. Write a SQL that show us this.’ This was not nice, Camilla was not prepared and it was not a trivial task, but she nailed it. Today Camilla is Team Lead for Business Intelligence at the company.

When Ulf left the company, Johan was hired. Johan was a young mathematician, with no special IT skills apart from playing computer games and some Matlab knowledge. Johan was a nice and intelligent guy, so we hired him. Johan joined us in the summer and he worked a week before two weeks of vacation, I told him he had to learn SQL during the leave otherwise he had to go. Johan came back not only knowing SQL inside out, but understood SQL better than anyone I know, after two weeks! He must have been working very hard that vacation. When Johan left, Camilla and I demanded we should have Petter transferred from the logistics department. Petter is a mathematician and a civil engineer, he also has his own football team where he is a bone crusher in the defense, (Johan is a forward in the team).

When I left, Feven replaced me, she has a solid IT education and is very sharp. You only explain once and she get it and do something better of it. After a week she managed the Data warehouse operations, and soon started to develop BI applications. She was project leader and developer of a new Data Warehouse for a factory in Milan, Italy. Apart from that she did a few PHP hacks in the ETL engine, fixing some old bugs of mine.

When Feven left, Henrik was recruited from another company in the Atlas Copco group. Henrik is a civil engineer and yet another brilliant co-worker of the Data Warehouse. Apart from the normal Data Warehouse operations and development Henrik is doing a lot of Qlikview development, and some PHP hacks fixing old bugs of mine.

I feel privileged to have worked with these five brilliant guys (Camilla, Johan, Petter, Feven and Henrik). It is a joy and pleasure to see new people taking on something you have created to new levels in ways you never anticipated yourself. I am sure Ulf Davidsson is proud of this progression of the Data Warehouse too.

It might look suspicious none of these guys stayed long. Camilla is still in the company, but now responsible for BI, and that is different from being a BI developer. They all being young and talented, it is just natural they move around. All of them have made significant contributions to the Data Warehouse.  I’m sure there will be a new brilliant member of the BI team replacing Petter, working together with Camilla and Henrik making the Data Warehouse better.