Book Image

Data Analysis Using SQL and Excel - Second Edition

By : Gordon S. S. Linoff
Book Image

Data Analysis Using SQL and Excel - Second Edition

By: Gordon S. S. Linoff

Overview of this book

Data Analysis Using SQL and Excel, 2nd Edition shows you how to leverage the two most popular tools for data query and analysis—SQL and Excel—to perform sophisticated data analysis without the need for complex and expensive data mining tools. Written by a leading expert on business data mining, this book shows you how to extract useful business information from relational databases. You'll learn the fundamental techniques before moving into the "where" and "why" of each analysis, and then learn how to design and perform these analyses using SQL and Excel. Examples include SQL and Excel code, and the appendix shows how non-standard constructs are implemented in other major databases, including Oracle and IBM DB2/UDB. The companion website includes datasets and Excel spreadsheets, and the book provides hints, warnings, and technical asides to help you every step of the way. Data Analysis Using SQL and Excel, 2nd Edition shows you how to perform a wide range of sophisticated analyses using these simple tools, sparing you the significant expense of proprietary data mining tools like SAS.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Foreword
17
EULA

Operations to Build Customer Signatures

Customer signatures bring data together from disparate data sources, as suggested in Figure 13-4

Six different rectangles joined end to end. Start of each marked as Copying; Pivoting; Summarizing; Looking up; Looking up, summarizing; Calculating with description beside.

Figure 13.4: The data in customer signatures needs to be brought together using a variety of processing methods.

Driving Table

The first step in building customer signatures is identifying the correct group of customers and the appropriate cutoff date. A customer signature has a set of conditions that determine whether any given customer should be in the signature. The table that defines these customers is the driving table, which may be an actual table or a subquery.

The driving table defines the population for the signatures and the cut off date. If the signatures are built only for customers who have been around for one year, then the driving table defines this population. Sometimes, filtering can be done after the customer signature has been created for all customers. Sometimes it is simpler to do it when building the signatures.

In an ideal...