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

Date and Time Data Types for Analysis

We are all familiar with dates and times, but we don't often think about how these quantitative measures are represented. Yes, they are represented using numbers, but not with a single number. Instead, they are measured with a set of numbers, with one number each for the year, month, day, hour, minute, and so on.

What we might not realize, though, is that this is a complex representation, comprising several different components. For example, knowing the current minute without knowing the current hour is useless. Additionally, there are complex ways of interacting with dates and times, for example, different points in time can be subtracted from one another. The current time can be represented differently depending on where you are in the world.

As a result of these intricacies, we need to take special care when working with this type of data. In fact, PostgreSQL, like most databases, offers special data types that can represent these...