Jump-start your career as a data scientist—learn to develop datasets for exploration, analysis, and machine learning SQL for Data Scientists: A Beginner's Guide for Building Datasets for Analysis is a resource that’s dedicated to the Structured Query Language (SQL) and dataset design skills that data scientists use most. Aspiring data scientists will learn how to how to construct datasets for exploration, analysis, and machine learning. You can also discover how to approach query design and develop SQL code to extract data insights while avoiding common pitfalls. You may be one of many people who are entering the field of Data Science from a range of professions and educational backgrounds, such as business analytics, social science, physics, economics, and computer science. Like many of them, you may have conducted analyses using spreadsheets as data sources, but never retrieved and engineered datasets from a relational database using SQL, which is a programming language designed for managing databases and extracting data. This guide for data scientists differs from other instructional guides on the subject. It doesn’t cover SQL broadly. Instead, you’ll learn the subset of SQL skills that data analysts and data scientists use frequently. You’ll also gain practical advice and direction on "how to think about constructing your dataset." Gain an understanding of relational database structure, query design, and SQL syntax Develop queries to construct datasets for use in applications like interactive reports and machine learning algorithms Review strategies and approaches so you can design analytical datasets Practice your techniques with the provided database and SQL code In this book, author Renee Teate shares knowledge gained during a 15-year career working with data, in roles ranging from database developer to data analyst to data scientist. She guides you through SQL code and dataset design concepts from an industry practitioner’s perspective, moving your data scientist career forward!

This textbook explains SQL within the context of data science and introduces the different parts of SQL as they are needed for the tasks usually carried out during data analysis. Using the framework of the data life cycle, it focuses on the steps that are very often given the short shift in traditional textbooks, like data loading, cleaning and pre-processing. The book is organized as follows. Chapter 1 describes the data life cycle, i.e. the sequence of stages from data acquisition to archiving, that data goes through as it is prepared and then actually analyzed, together with the different activities that take place at each stage. Chapter 2 gets into databases proper, explaining how relational databases organize data. Non-traditional data, like XML and text, are also covered. Chapter 3 introduces SQL queries, but unlike traditional textbooks, queries and their parts are described around typical data analysis tasks like data exploration, cleaning and transformation. Chapter 4 introduces some basic techniques for data analysis and shows how SQL can be used for some simple analyses without too much complication. Chapter 5 introduces additional SQL constructs that are important in a variety of situations and thus completes the coverage of SQL queries. Lastly, chapter 6 briefly explains how to use SQL from within R and from within Python programs. It focuses on how these languages can interact with a database, and how what has been learned about SQL can be leveraged to make life easier when using R or Python. All chapters contain a lot of examples and exercises on the way, and readers are encouraged to install the two open-source database systems (MySQL and Postgres) that are used throughout the book in order to practice and work on the exercises, because simply reading the book is much less useful than actually using it. This book is for anyone interested in data science and/or databases. It just demands a bit of computer fluency, but no specific background on databases or data analysis. All concepts are introduced intuitively and with a minimum of specialized jargon. After going through this book, readers should be able to profitably learn more about data mining, machine learning, and database management from more advanced textbooks and courses.

Useful business analysis requires you to effectively transform data into actionable information. This book helps you use SQL and Excel to extract business information from relational databases and use that data to define business dimensions, store transactions about customers, produce results, and more. Each chapter explains when and why to perform a particular type of business analysis in order to obtain useful results, how to design and perform the analysis using SQL and Excel, and what the results should look like.

With the explosion of data, computing power, and cloud data warehouses, SQL has become an even more indispensable tool for the savvy analyst or data scientist. This practical book reveals new and hidden ways to improve your SQL skills, solve problems, and make the most of SQL as part of your workflow. You'll learn how to use both common and exotic SQL functions such as joins, window functions, subqueries, and regular expressions in new, innovative ways--as well as how to combine SQL techniques to accomplish your goals faster, with understandable code. If you work with SQL databases, this is a must-have reference. Learn the key steps for preparing your data for analysis Perform time series analysis using SQL's date and time manipulations Use cohort analysis to investigate how groups change over time Use SQL's powerful functions and operators for text analysis Detect outliers in your data and replace them with alternate values Establish causality using experiment analysis, also known as A/B testing

Take your first steps to become a fully qualified data analyst by learning how to explore large relational datasets. Key Features Explore a variety of statistical techniques to analyze your data Integrate your SQL pipelines with other analytics technologies Perform advanced analytics such as geospatial and text analysis Book Description Understanding and finding patterns in data has become one of the most important ways to improve business decisions. If you know the basics of SQL, but don't know how to use it to gain business insights from data, this book is for you. SQL for Data Analytics covers everything you need progress from simply knowing basic SQL to telling stories and identifying trends in data. You'll be able to start exploring your data by identifying patterns and unlocking deeper insights. You'll also gain experience working with different types of data in SQL, including time-series, geospatial, and text data. Finally, you'll understand how to become productive with SQL with the help of profiling and automation to gain insights faster. By the end of the book, you'll able to use SQL in everyday business scenarios efficiently and look at data with the critical eye of analytics professional. What you will learn Use SQL to summarize and identify patterns in data Apply special SQL clauses and functions to generate descriptive statistics Use SQL queries and subqueries to prepare data for analysis Perform advanced statistical calculations using the window function Analyze special data types in SQL, including geospatial data and time data Import and export data using a text file and PostgreSQL Debug queries that won't run Optimize queries to improve their performance for faster results Who this book is for If you're a database engineer looking to transition into analytics, or a backend engineer who wants to develop a deeper understanding of production data, you will find this book useful. This book is also ideal for data scientists or business analysts who want to improve their data analytics skills using SQL. Knowledge of basic SQL and database concepts will aid in understanding the concepts covered in this book.

This new book is an essential tool for utilizing the ANSI SQL outer join operation, and an indispensable guide to using this operation to perform simple or complex data modeling. It provides a comprehensive look at the outer join operation, its powerful syntax, and new features and capabilities that can be developed based on the operation's data modeling capacity.

Analyze data like a pro, even if you’re a beginner. Practical SQL is an approachable and fast-paced guide to SQL (Structured Query Language), the standard programming language for defining, organizing, and exploring data in relational databases. Anthony DeBarros, a journalist and data analyst, focuses on using SQL to find the story within your data. The examples and code use the open-source database PostgreSQL and its companion pgAdmin interface, and the concepts you learn will apply to most database management systems, including MySQL, Oracle, SQLite, and others.* You’ll first cover the fundamentals of databases and the SQL language, then build skills by analyzing data from real-world datasets such as US Census demographics, New York City taxi rides, and earthquakes from US Geological Survey. Each chapter includes exercises and examples that teach even those who have never programmed before all the tools necessary to build powerful databases and access information quickly and efficiently. You’ll learn how to: Create databases and related tables using your own data Aggregate, sort, and filter data to find patterns Use functions for basic math and advanced statistical operations Identify errors in data and clean them up Analyze spatial data with a geographic information system (PostGIS) Create advanced queries and automate tasks This updated second edition has been thoroughly revised to reflect the latest in SQL features, including additional advanced query techniques for wrangling data. This edition also has two new chapters: an expanded set of instructions on for setting up your system plus a chapter on using PostgreSQL with the popular JSON data interchange format. Learning SQL doesn’t have to be dry and complicated. Practical SQL delivers clear examples with an easy-to-follow approach to teach you the tools you need to build and manage your own databases. * Microsoft SQL Server employs a variant of the language called T-SQL, which is not covered by Practical SQL.