This book is intended to train the market professional or college student on SQL for information generation and data analytics. All the examples in the book concentrate on business questions such as calculating the number of sales by customers, business revenue by city and year, identifying customers who have not ordered lately, customer segmentation, cycle-time calculations, inventory replenishment, and hundreds of similar questions. This book has been primarily used by business professionals as well as a textbook in the business schools of several colleges and universities.
For the instructor, Pindaro tried to make this book as friendly as possible. He personally tested the book in his own classes to see how the labs work in the class/training environment. He has also prepared a separate booklet that the instructor can receive as a pdf/word file (upon confirmation of instructor status) that includes the solutions to all the case studies.
There are two fundamental principles followed by the author in this book. First, there should be no software to buy. Second, there must exist clear, step by step instructions on how to download the free version of SQL Server, how to install it, how to download the sample database, how to install it, and finally how to start using the book. A whole chapter has been devoted to help the professional or student go through this process.
It is also extremely important to be able to start from zero and become a professional in the usage of SQL for analytics. Please take into consideration that this book concentrates on data manipulation and analytics. If you need a SQL book towards database administration and transaction processing such as creating users, setting security policies, and management plans, you will need to refer to other excellent books which concentrate on database administration (DBA) tasks.
This book concentrates on the production of analytics. To that purpose it contains 293 exercises in its 33 chapters which the student can complete at his or her own time or during class with an instructor. It also contains at the end of each chapter, ten discussion questions and two case studies with five problems each for sharpening the skills taught in the chapter.
This book is the culmination of Pindaro's 22 years of pedagogical experience in the area of data and analytics at the University level. In addition, the author has thirty years of experience in the market collaborating with more than fifteen companies. After multiple decades with hundreds of labs and thousands of questions and comments from the students as well as market professionals, Pindaro wrote this book to assist the readers in becoming SQL professionals so that they can be successful with their data manipulation tasks in their working environment.
Currently, no matter the position, industry, or job function, it looks like everyone is asking for SQL skills. SQL is needed for data integration (ETL), data warehousing, big data, machine learning, data mining, artificial intelligence on premise or on the cloud.
