Alexander Zarach

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT ALEXANDER ZARACH

My collaboration with clients begins with a sea of data they\'ve been collecting, clusters of information scattered throughout the organisation, different collections owned by different stakeholders. There are some databases, some files, some existing reports, often multiple versions of the same report made by different teams. Indeed it\'s very common to have multiple versions of the truth, many definitions of the same thing, sometimes within the same dataset, often all correct or valid in their own way. Clients want to make sense of this, they want to gain meaning and insight so they can improve. They inevitably want something slick and transparent and, above all, trustworthy. They want to have confidence in what goes into their reports, they want what comes out of the reports to make sense, and they want to know they can bring the same trusted data into lots of new reports for many different audiences. What they don\'t want is duplication of effort, duplication of data, or to be delivered things which don\'t make sense or don\'t save them time.I understand them, after all it\'s what I deliver.More rewarding than anything else is being given a new system to look at and being able to not only report on what\'s in it but also how it links into other datasets, creating a single thread of data across several systems, bringing disparate data sources together.Here\'s, at a very high level, a sample of what I do- I design and model databases - staging and landing areas, repositories, Star Schemas- I produce ETL to populate them - I have extensive experience in Microsoft SSIS, including using Xtract IS to connect it to SAP, but equally enjoy creating dataflows in Fabric- I build semantic models, reports and dashboards in Microsoft Power BI (I\'m PL-300 certified). My Power BI experience spans Report Server through to Premium-only capabilities in the cloud service- I am fluent in SQL, Microsoft and Oracle variants included, and performance-tune every query I write.I have worked with Azure components including Azure SQL Server, Logic Apps, Automation, but I\'m vendor agnostic, and equally comfortable working with AWS or Google Cloud.I understand security, having extensive experience with clients who depend on it, and I understand performance having frequently reported from critical live systems for the emergency services (I know Niche and Storm databases intimately among others).In 2021 my work with Sussex Police led to Atos and Sussex Police winning an MCA Award for Data and Innovation in the Public Sector.