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

Transforming Data

Often, the raw data presented in a query output may not be in the form we would like it to be. We may want to remove values, substitute values, or map values to other values. To accomplish these tasks, SQL provides a wide variety of statements and functions. Functions are keywords that take in inputs such as a column or a scalar value and change those inputs into some sort of output. We will discuss some very useful functions for cleaning data in the following sections.

CASE WHEN

CASE WHEN is a function that allows a query to map various values in a column to other values. The general format of a CASE WHEN statement is:

CASE WHEN condition1 THEN value1
WHEN condition2 THEN value2
…
WHEN conditionX THEN valueX
ELSE else_value END

Here, condition1 and condition2, through conditionX, are Boolean conditions; value1 and value2, through valueX, are values to map the Boolean conditions; and else_value is the value that is mapped if none of the Boolean...