Book Image

SQL for Data Analytics - Third Edition

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

SQL for Data Analytics - Third Edition

By: Jun Shan, 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. 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 with the GROUP BY Clause

So far, you have used aggregate functions to calculate statistics for an entire column. However, most times you are interested in not only the aggregate values for a whole table but also the values for smaller groups in the table. To illustrate this, refer back to the customers table. You know that the total number of customers is 50,000. However, you might want to know how many customers there are in each state. But how can you calculate this?

You could determine how many states there are with the following query:

SELECT DISTINCT 
  state 
FROM 
  customers;

You will see 50 distinct states, Washington D.C., and NULL returned as a result of the preceding query, totaling 52 rows. Once you have the list of states, you could then run the following query for each state:

SELECT 
  COUNT(*) 
FROM 
  customers 
WHERE 
  state='{state}'

Although you can do this, it is...