Book Image

The Applied SQL Data Analytics Workshop - Second Edition

By : Matt Goldwasser, Upom Malik, Benjamin Johnston
3.5 (2)
Book Image

The Applied SQL Data Analytics Workshop - Second Edition

3.5 (2)
By: Matt Goldwasser, Upom Malik, Benjamin Johnston

Overview of this book

Every day, businesses operate around the clock and a huge amount of data is generated at a rapid pace. Hidden in this data are key patterns and behaviors that can help you and your business understand your customers at a deep, fundamental level. Are you ready to enter the exciting world of data analytics and unlock these useful insights? Written by a team of expert data scientists who have used their data analytics skills to transform businesses of all shapes and sizes, The Applied SQL Data Analytics Workshop is a great way to get started with data analysis, showing you how to effectively sieve and process information from raw data, even without any prior experience. The book begins by showing you how to form hypotheses and generate descriptive statistics that can provide key insights into your existing data. As you progress, you'll learn how to write SQL queries to aggregate, calculate and combine SQL data from sources outside of your current dataset. You'll also discover how to work with different data types, like JSON. By exploring advanced techniques, such as geospatial analysis and text analysis, you'll finally be able to understand your business at a deeper level. Finally, the book lets you in on the secret to getting information faster and more effectively by using advanced techniques like profiling and automation. By the end of The Applied SQL Data Analytics Workshop, you'll have the skills you need to start identifying patterns and unlocking insights in your own data. You will be capable of looking and assessing data with the critical eye of a skilled data analyst.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)
Preface
7
7. The Scientific Method and Applied Problem Solving

Best Practices for Importing and Exporting Data

At this point, we have seen several different methods for reading and writing data between our computer and our database. Each method has its own use case and purpose. Generally, there are going to be two key factors that should guide your decision-making process:

  • You should try to access the database with the same tool that you will use to analyze the data. As you add more steps to get your data from the database to your analytics tool, you increase the ways in which new errors can arise. When you can't access the database using the same tool that you will use to process the data, you should use psql to read and write CSV files to your database.
  • When writing data, you can save time by using the COPY or \copy commands.

Going Passwordless

In addition to everything mentioned so far, it is also a good idea to set up a .pgpass file. A .pgpass file specifies the parameters that you use to connect to your database...