Book Image

SQL for Data Analytics

By : Upom Malik, Matt Goldwasser, Benjamin Johnston
3 (1)
Book Image

SQL for Data Analytics

3 (1)
By: Upom Malik, Matt Goldwasser, Benjamin Johnston

Overview of this book

Understanding and finding patterns in data has become one of the most important ways to improve business decisions. If you know the basics of SQL, but don't know how to use it to gain the most effective business insights from data, this book is for you. SQL for Data Analytics helps you build the skills to move beyond basic SQL and instead learn to spot patterns and explain the logic hidden in data. You'll discover how to explore and understand data by identifying trends and unlocking deeper insights. You'll also gain experience working with different types of data in SQL, including time-series, geospatial, and text data. Finally, you'll learn how to increase your productivity with the help of profiling and automation. By the end of this book, you'll be able to use SQL in everyday business scenarios efficiently and look at data with the critical eye of an analytics professional. Please note: if you are having difficulty loading the sample datasets, there are new instructions uploaded to the GitHub repository. The link to the GitHub repository can be found in the book's preface.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
9
9. Using SQL to Uncover the Truth – a Case Study

Summary

Relational databases are a mature and ubiquitous technology that is used to store and query data. Relational databases store data in the form of relations, also known as tables, which allow for an excellent combination of performance, efficiency, and ease of use. SQL is the language used to access relational databases. SQL is a declarative language that allows users to focus on what to create, as opposed to how to create it. SQL supports many different data types, including numeric data, text data, and even data structures.

When querying data, SQL allows a user to pick which fields to pull, as well as how to filter the data. This data can also be ordered, and SQL allows for as much or as little data as we need to be pulled. Creating, updating, and deleting data is also fairly simple and can be quite surgical.

Now that we have reviewed the basics of SQL, we will discuss how SQL can be used to perform the first step in data analytics, cleaning, and the transformation of...