Book Image

SQL for Data Analytics. - Third Edition

By : Jun Shan, Matt Goldwasser, Upom Malik
Book Image

SQL for Data Analytics. - Third Edition

By: Jun Shan, Matt Goldwasser, Upom Malik

Overview of this book

Every day, businesses operate around the clock, and a huge amount of data is generated at a rapid pace. This book helps you analyze this data and identify key patterns and behaviors that can help you and your business understand your customers at a deep, fundamental level. SQL for Data Analytics, Third Edition is a great way to get started with data analysis, showing how to effectively sort and process information from raw data, even without any prior experience. You will begin by learning how to form hypotheses and generate descriptive statistics that can provide key insights into your existing data. As you progress, you will learn how to write SQL queries to aggregate, calculate, and combine SQL data from sources outside of your current dataset. You will also discover how to work with advanced data types, like JSON. By exploring advanced techniques, such as geospatial analysis and text analysis, you will 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 this book, you will be proficient in the efficient application of SQL techniques in everyday business scenarios and looking at data with the critical eye of analytics professional.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
9
9. Using SQL to Uncover the Truth: A Case Study

Aggregate Functions

In addition to just seeing individual rows of data, it is also interesting to understand the properties of an entire column or table. For example, say you just received a sample dataset of a fictional company called ZoomZoom, which specializes in car and electronic scooter retailing. You are wondering about the number of customers that this ZoomZoom database contains. You could select all the data from the table and then see how many rows were pulled back, but it would be incredibly tedious to do so. Luckily, there are functions provided by SQL that can be used to perform this type of calculation on large groups of rows. These functions are called aggregate functions.

Aggregate functions take in one or more columns with multiple rows and return a number based on those columns. The following table provides a summary of the major aggregate functions that are used in SQL:

Figure 4.1: Major aggregate functions

The most frequently used...