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

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, including your password. All of the programmatic methods of accessing the database discussed in this chapter (using either psql or Python) will allow you to skip the password parameter if your .pgpass file contains the password for the matching hostname, database, and username. This not only saves you time but also increases the security of your database because you can freely share your code without having to worry about passwords embedded in the code.

On Unix-based systems and macOS, you can create the .pgpass file in your home directory. On Windows, you can create the file in %APPDATA%\postgresql\pgpass.conf. %APPDATA% is a Windows system value that points to the current application data folder. You can get the actual value of it by opening Windows Explorer, typing the exact word %APPDATA...