13 Feb 2024 Jill Thornhill Integrating SQL with Python for Data Analysis Integrating SQL with Python isn’t difficult. The two tools work together to combine the information-processing power of relational databases with the flexibility of a programming language. In this article, I will discuss the benefits of data analysis using SQL and Python, with real-world coding examples. Why do most of the best data analysis tools on the market – such as Tableau and Power BI – include both SQL and Python in their toolboxes? Read more 30 Jan 2024 Tihomir Babic SQL Server Date Functions: A Data Analysis Guide Date functions are the bread and butter of data analysis and reporting with SQL Server. In this guide, I will show you practical examples of the use of SQL Server date functions and how to apply them to your reports. A question for all data analysts: Do you want to be taken seriously? I’m sure you do. In that case, knowing SQL Server date functions is mandatory. Date and time data types are ubiquitous in databases, as they are essential for reporting. Read more 19 Oct 2023 Tihomir Babic Top 29 SQL Server Interview Questions Looking for an SQL Server job? Review these 29 must-know SQL Server interview questions and you’ll be well-prepared. And don’t worry about looking up the answers – we provide them, too! Microsoft SQL Server's first version was released in 1989 and has a rich history. It has come a long way since then, becoming one of the most used database engines in the data industry. In the last ten years, it’s been the third most popular database engine. Read more 4 Sep 2023 LearnSQL.com Team SQL Server Cheat Sheet Welcome to the SQL Server Cheat Sheet! Whether you're just starting out with SQL Server or you're a seasoned developer looking for a quick reference, this guide is tailored for you. This cheat sheet is a comprehensive guide to SQL Server, offering a quick reference to its essential commands. It covers the basics of creating and displaying databases and tables, the commands to modify tables, and the fundamental syntax for T-SQL commands such as SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE. Read more 27 Jun 2023 Jill Thornhill How to Learn T-SQL Querying T-SQL is the dialect of SQL used by Microsoft SQL Server databases. Find out the best way to learn T-SQL querying with interactive online courses. In today's data-driven world, increasing your database knowledge is always a good choice. Microsoft SQL Server is one of the most popular databases nowadays. Knowing T-SQL – the query language of SQL Server databases –is often recommended as a worthwhile skill for careers in IT, business, or research fields. Read more 23 May 2023 Nicole Darnley How to Write a Recursive CTE in SQL Server A guide to understanding and using recursive CTEs in SQL Server SQL Server offers a lot of powerful tools for working with data, including Common Table Expressions (CTEs). A CTE is a temporary named result set that you can reference within a SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE statement. CTEs can break down long queries into smaller, more manageable pieces of logic and make them more readable. SQL Server offers recursive Common Table Expressions. Read more 8 Dec 2022 Martyna Sławińska How to Export Data From Microsoft SQL Server to a CSV File When working with data and databases, it is common to export data for further processing or transport to another database. Follow this article to learn how to export data from Microsoft SQL Server to a CSV file. In this article, we first recall what a CSV file is and why you would want to export data in this format from an MS SQL Server database. Then, we cut to the chase and export data to a CSV file using both SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) and SQL Command Line (SQLCMD). Read more 23 Jun 2022 Tihomir Babic An Overview of Microsoft SQL Server Text Functions Data analysts use text values when creating SQL reports. You can create your own labels with functions, classify rows based on text value, or do computations based on it. This article covers how to do all that. The text values in databases are not just for reading. As with numeric values, we perform operations on them and manipulate the text. SQL Server has a fair number of text functions. Read more 14 Dec 2021 Jakub Romanowski Top 5 MS SQL Server Courses for Beginners Every journey, including a career change, begins with the first step. If you're thinking about learning data analysis or strengthening your MS SQL Server skills arsenal, you've come to the right place. Here are the top 5 MS SQL Server online courses. Enjoy! You've probably heard that today’s organizations rely heavily on data analysis. You heard right. They are looking for employees who can navigate the world of databases and draw conclusions from data. Read more 3 Aug 2021 Jakub Romanowski Free Course of the Month: SQL Reports in SQL Server This is another in our series of free SQL Courses of the Month. This time, you can learn SQL Reporting in MS SQL Server for free. Do you want to be able to prepare even better SQL reports? Or maybe you have some basic knowledge of SQL Server (one of the major SQL dialects) and would like to go a step further? This is the course for you. Read more 2 Apr 2020 Agnieszka Kozubek-Krycuń How to Group Data by Week in SQL Server This is additional content for the LearnSQL.com course Customer Behavior Analysis in SQL Server. In this course, we showed you how you can analyze the customer lifecycle (customer acquisition, conversion, activity, retention, and churn) with SQL. We discussed customer registration cohorts, or groups of customers who registered during the same period (e.g. same week, same month). Analyzing customer registration cohorts lets you see registration trends and relate registration cohorts with marketing campaigns. Read more 13 Nov 2019 Belma Mesihovic Grouping Data in SQL Server People who work with data know that data grouping can sometimes be a chore. If you struggle and waste hours with Excel, OpenOffice, or some other tool trying to group various sets of data, take a look at this article and learn how to do the work much quicker and easier by using SQL. You often find yourself in a situation where you need to analyze data and present the results in a form other than the one in which the data is stored. Read more 25 Jan 2017 Jeffrey J. Keller Grouping, Rolling, and Cubing Data The first two articles in this series highlighted SQL Server's ability to organize data into user-defined windows and its aggregate functions. Part 3 will focus on other methods of aggregating and organizing data using built-in SQL Server features – specifically, its grouping functions. For consistency, the same base data will be used as in the first two parts of this series. CREATE TABLE WindowTable (WindowID INT IDENTITY, House Varchar(32), FullName Varchar(64), PhysicalSkill Decimal(4, 2), MentalSkill Decimal (4, 2)) GO Read more 9 Aug 2016 Jeffrey J. Keller Window Functions: Part Two: Aggregating Data In part one of this series on SQL Server window functions, the functionality of the OVER() clause was discussed. This article will focus on aggregate functions. The majority of these can be used in conjunction with OVER. Some, like SUM() and AVG(), are widely used. Others — including VARP() and CHECKSUM_AGG() — are not as well-known, but are potentially quite useful. OVER defines the user-specified range on which a function is applied. Read more 21 Jun 2016 Jeffrey J. Keller Window Functions in SQL Server: Part One: The OVER() Clause Window functions were first introduced in standard SQL 2003 and then extended in SQL 2008. Since SQL Server 2005, Microsoft has been steadily improving window functions in the database engine. These functions perform an aggregate operation against a user-defined range of rows (the window) and return a detail-level value for each row. Well-known aggregate functions include SUM, AVG, MIN, MAX, and many others. Recent versions of SQL Server have introduced ranking and analytic functions such as LAG, LEAD, RANK, CUME_DIST, and many others. Read more 29 Oct 2014 Patrycja Dybka Basic Date and Time Functions in MS SQL Server As a follow up to our article “The Most Useful Date and Time Functions in Oracle Database”, let’s review what date and time functions look like in MS SQL Server. Let’s start with functions that extract a year, month and day from a given date. declare @dt date = '2014-10-20' select year (@dt) as year, month (@dt) as month, day (@dt) as day SQL Server uses GETDATE() and SYSDATETIME() to get a current date and time. Read more