Stack options: Ingestion (ETL/ELT): Fivetran, Matillion, Azure Data Factory Storage: Snowflake, BigQuery, Azure Synapse, Redshift, or self-hosted if you're big enough Reverse ETL: Hightouch, Census Modeling: dbt Analytics: Tableau, Looker, Power BI, Microsoft Fabric Reporting Automation & Distribution: Rollstack Governance: Collibra, Alation Observability & Compliance: Monte Carlo, BigID AI Augmentation: Microsoft CoPilot, Cursor, Tableau Einstein for enhanced analytics, data exploration, and report generation Team Structure: CIO: Ideally hands-on, driving data culture Director/VP: Owns data strategy, oversees execution Managers: Leading ingestion, analytics, governance teams Analysts: Building reports, answering key business Qs Compliance Team: Cross-functional, integrated with BI Interns & New Hires: Learning & tackling foundational tasks Data Agencies and Auditors to supplement the team Cloud Platform: Azure for full MS integration Retention: Have a scheduled promotion scheme, ensure competitive wages, and keep growth opportunities visible—brain drain is real. More on reddit.com

Power BI. If you know what your doing with that tool and Azure you shouldn't need a dozen other tools. It is dominating the quadrants. It is cheap. Paginated is now included in Pro. Dwh, measures in dax, blob storage compatibility, great visualization, can migrate cubes to it, etc. Tableau is not getting investment, others are either immature, dying, recreating the wheel.... More on reddit.com

If you’re looking past Power BI and want something more modern, a few tools stand out, especially if you’re working with cloud warehouses: Astrato: Easiest setup by far. It’s usually the fastest path to a first dashboard because everything runs in the browser and connects live to Snowflake/BigQuery/Databricks without any modelling layers or extracts. Very smooth for interactive, customisable dashboards and self-service. Sigma: Great for people who think in spreadsheets and want warehouse-scale analysis. Just be aware the pricing has a pretty high entry point compared to other tools. ThoughtSpot: Strong for search-driven analytics, but not very customizable visually. Expect your dashboards to look “like a ThoughtSpot dashboard” unless you’re ok with their styling defaults. All three are fast, cloud-native, and built to support real-time data rather than desktop publishing. If you’re trying things out, spin up a small test in each and see which style fits your workflow. More on reddit.com

SQL, Excel, tableau or pbi should be your base for a BI analyst. But, companies merge/confuse/mix and match bi analysts with analytics engineers/data engineers so if you want to separate yourself and pick up more DE related tools, it’s a great nice to have. That being said, I feel like SQL is the most important and being a damn near expert is worth the time learning. I see ppl saying yeah i know how to do a window function but they rarely know WHY, because it’s an easy skill to pick up but harder to master. More on reddit.com