If You Work With Data Make SQL Your Best Friend

If you’re working with data as a data engineer, an analyst or BI developer*, then you really should make SQL your best friend.

SQL may have been around since the 1970s, but it is still the lingua franca of data. It’s sole purpose was, and still is, to manage data.

Throughout my 30+ year career I have developed ETL and analytic applications across a whole host of database technologies including Microsoft Access (no, really!), SQL Server, Oracle, Teradata, Netezza, Greenplum, Redshift, BigQuery, MySQL and Postgres. Apologies to the ones I’ve forgotten.

These databases ranged in size from a few megabytes right up to clustered systems with single tables exceeding 10TB and 100 billion rows.

The common denominator? SQL.

There is no business logic that can’t be delivered with SQL. Trust me, I’ve worked in banking for over 10 years!

SQL scales from small systems all the way up to very large systems without having to change the coding approach.

SQL is free and there are countless learning resources out there.

If you work with data, make SQL your best friend.

On a lighter note, SQL is pronounced ‘ess-queue-ell’, not ‘sequel’.

Also, for performance reasons, commas go at the start, not the end; spaces are allowed, whereas tabs are verboten; lower case is OK, Mixed or UPPER case are not 😉

* I don’t include (real) data scientists in this group. These folk are ‘all about algorithms’ and don’t see themselves, on the whole, as database folk. They have their own specialist tools like Python and R. Knowing SQL will never do them any harm though.