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

Using Aggregates to Clean Data and Examine Data Quality

In Chapter 2, The Basics of SQL for Analytics, we discussed how SQL can be used to clean data. While the techniques in Chapter 2, The Basics of SQL for Analytics for Analytics, do an excellent job of cleaning data, aggregates add a number of techniques that can make cleaning data even easier and more comprehensive. In this section, we will look at some of these techniques.

Finding Missing Values with GROUP BY

As mentioned in Chapter 2, The Basics of SQL for Analytics, one of the biggest issues with cleaning data is dealing with missing values. While in Chapter 2, The Basics of SQL for Analytics, we discussed how to find missing values and how we could get rid of them, we did not say too much about how we could determine the extent of missing data in a dataset. Primarily, it was because we did not have the tools to deal with summarizing information in a dataset – that is, until this chapter.

Using aggregates, identifying...