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

Functions and Triggers

So far in this chapter, we have discovered how to quantify query performance via the query planner, as well as the benefits of using joins to collate and extract information from multiple database tables. In this section, we will construct reusable queries and statements via functions, as well as automatic function execution via trigger callbacks. The combination of these two SQL features can be used to not only run queries or re-index tables as data is added to/updated in/removed from the database, but also to run hypothesis tests and track the results of the tests throughout the life of the database.

Function Definitions

As in almost all other programming or scripting languages, functions in SQL are contained sections of code, which provides a lot of benefits, such as efficient code reuse and simplified troubleshooting processes. We can use functions to repeat/modify statements or queries without re-entering the statement each time or searching...