GBDS case studies
GBDS · Put your knowledge to work in context.
The GBDS (Global Business Data Specialist) credential is designed for professionals who bridge business needs and data solutions. It suits business analysts, data analysts, database developers, and BI practitioners who want to demonstrate end-to-end competence: eliciting requirements, designing relational models, writing SQL, ensuring data quality and security, building ETL pipelines, delivering analytics, and managing data projects. The GBDS case studies are 5 cases and about 4,671 words.
1The 49 Requirements That Were Really Design Decisions
A regional bank is replacing its loan-origination platform. After eight workshops the business analyst holds 412 candidate requirements, of which 118 are marked 'must'.
891 words, about 4 min2Reproducing an Invoice From a Table That Only Knows Today's Price
A mid-market SaaS vendor bills business customers annually in advance, per seat, across three pricing tiers. Its warehouse holds a Product table with a single current unit price and current tier column, overwritten each night by the CRM synchronisation job.
949 words, about 5 min3Zero Rows, Doubled Totals, and a Forty-Minute Query
An analyst maintains a month-end reconciliation against the general ledger. The core query selects from payments, about 9 million rows per month, and excludes batches already settled: SELECT p.payment id, p.amount FROM payments p WHERE p.batch id NOT IN (SELECT batch id FROM settled batches); It returned the expected ~1.2 million rows until the upstream team added a nullable batch id to settled batches; since then it returns zero rows.
935 words, about 5 min4The Sandbox Copy, the Hash, and the Erasure Request
A retail insurer's marketing analytics team copied the production customer table into an unsanctioned cloud sandbox to debug a churn model. The table holds name, email, mobile number, full postal address, date of birth, policy number and a SHA-256 hash of the national ID.
928 words, about 5 min5Late-Arriving Dimensions and Three Tempting Shortcuts
A nightly batch moves roughly 6 million change rows from three source systems (two Oracle, one SQL Server) into an on-premise star schema. The SLA defines a four-hour load window; the last ten runs averaged 5 hours 40 minutes and three of them overran the 07:00 reporting cut-off.
968 words, about 5 min