

The State of SQL Education - thingsilearned
http://chartio.com/blog/2013/07/the-state-of-sql-education

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ScottWhigham
The whole slant against "the business intelligence community" is just
uninformed IMO. I think that there's another side to this that the author
neglected to mention: self-service BI. The people who the author claims need a
"SQL education" might be better served by a well designed OLAP structure that
has a solid, easy-to-use front-end that allows users to find out what they
want without having to resort to SQL at all. Microsoft has made great
investments and strides in Excel, Excel-based tools (like PowerPivot), Report
Builder, and SharePoint (to name a few) that really make it quite easy to
browse relational, tabular, and multidimensional data. Does it help to learn
SQL? Probably. Is it a barrier to entry? Sure, at some places. However with
tools like PowerPivot it's becoming less about "learning a new language" and
more about "just getting to the data".

These tools are "magic beans" or other marketing BS - they're very real tools
that work great.

