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

Statistics with Window Functions

Now that you understand how window functions work, you can start using them to calculate useful statistics, such as ranks, percentiles, and rolling statistics.

In the following table, you have summarized a variety of statistical functions that are useful. It is also important to emphasize again that all aggregate functions can also be used as window functions (AVG, SUM, COUNT, and so on):

Figure 5.12: Statistical window functions

Normally, a call to any of these functions inside a SQL statement would be followed by the OVER keyword. This keyword will then be followed by more keywords like PARTITION BY and ORDER BY, either of which may be optional, depending on which function you are using.

For example, the ROW_NUMBER() function will look like this:

ROW_NUMBER() OVER(
  PARTITION BY column_1, column_2
  ORDER BY column_3, column_4
)

You will practice how to use these statistical functions in the...