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

Performing Geospatial Analysis in Postgres

In addition to looking at time series data to better understand trends, we can also use geospatial information – such as city, country, or latitude and longitude – to better understand our customers. For example, governments use geospatial analysis to better understand regional economic differences, while a ride-sharing platform might use geospatial data to find the closest driver for a given customer.

We can represent a geospatial location using latitude and longitude coordinates, and this will be the fundamental building block for us to begin geospatial analysis.

Latitude and Longitude

When we think about locations, we often think about it in terms of the address – the city, state, country, or postal code that is assigned to the location that we are interested in. From an analytics perspective, this is sometimes OK – for example, you can look at the sales volume by city and come up with meaningful results...