What's New at CFI | Advanced SQL for Data Analysts

Meeyeon Hi everyone, and welcome back to another episode of What's New at CFI, where we talk about the literal newness and goodness at CFI. Today I'm joined by Joseph. You are all very familiar with him in our Business Intelligence and Data courses. And today we're talking about advanced SQL for analysts.

Now, Joseph, we have just done a facelift on SQL fundamentals. And if a learner were to really enjoy the material in that course, what is the advanced course going to cover now? Joseph Yeates Yeah, so I think you could maybe sum up SQL fundamentals simply by saying it allows analysts to answer questions with data using SQL. So you get a really good foundation of being able to pull data from a database to answer questions.

And I would say that ⁓ as we shift to ⁓ the advanced course, the shift goes from answering specific questions with data and learning some of those key words. to structuring your queries and really structuring your thinking in SQL that your output is flexible. And you can start to think of how we can answer lots of different questions. So we're thinking more about what the output of our queries is gonna be.

Is that gonna go to Python? Is it going to go to Power BI? Maybe it's gonna go to Excel and our users ⁓ or maybe us as analysts are going to build models with our SQL data. So we have to start thinking about future a little bit of how we're going to use this information down the line.

And it's that sort of thinking that's the shift from the fundamentals course to the advanced course. Meeyeon And for the advanced SQL course, ⁓ is it by any chance more focused on a specific type of role within a specific industry? For example, are we going through exercises that have a backdrop of being at a bank or a data analysis firm? Joseph Yeates So we're using the same data set as we did from fundamentals.

So what's great is that if, if learners have gone through the fundamentals course, you're to be ready to jump right into the advanced courses. It's the same data set. it's a retail sales company, ⁓ looking at a lot of, a lot of different metrics sales over time, cost profit margin, sort of the typical sales, ⁓ stuff. ⁓ but I would say that this, the advanced course is focused.

a lot more on analysts, would say currently in a business intelligence or some sort of data analytics role using SQL. ⁓ This is building on those foundational skills. And really we're aiming at learners who are working with data every day and they're either communicating with a data engineering team and we're helping up skill in some of those areas to have better collaboration with your data engineering and your database administration. or if you're in a small team and you need to upskill in those areas yourself because it's going to be you who's going to take on some of those roles and responsibilities as well.

Meeyeon And you as an author of this course have worked in the field. And if you were to kind of look back at all the experiences that you've had in your career, at what point in your career do you think that this specific course would have been most helpful for you and why? Joseph Yeates I think one ⁓ anecdote comes to mind that I can remember from early on. And ⁓ I think my, I guess my path to SQL was probably similar to other analysts.

Like I started in Excel, started in Power BI and sort of more traditional BI tools. And then I started, you know, shifting backwards, of upstream to where the data comes from and start doing that. So ⁓ as I was building more and more complex reports, I wanted the flexibility to manipulate data in the way that I wanted to. I wanted to build some different tables, do some different transformations.

And typically in a larger organization, you need to put in a request to IT, a request to your database administrator or your engineering team to build some of these things for you. You don't always have the ability to do those things yourself. So what's nice in that a lot of modern self-service analytics or BI tools, you do have the ability to import data and do transformation yourself, but you need to know how to do that sort of manipulation and transformation of your data if you're doing more advanced things.

So I think a course like this would have been perfect when I was, you know, ready to, I had a little bit of confidence, a little bit of experience and I was ready to sort of push onto the next level and I needed to up skill in my SQL skills so I could. do more powerful things in my reports. Meeyeon And if there are a couple learners out there that are just on the fence of thinking, should I just skip the SQL fundamentals? think I might be a little, I think I might be a little bit more robust in SQL.

⁓ What would you say to the person that is thinking, should I skip it? Should I just go straight into the advanced? Joseph Yeates Yeah, I would say it depends. How's that for a non-answer?

I think if you Meeyeon Yeah, what do they what do they need to know in order for them to start the advanced course and be beyond solid footing? Joseph Yeates Got it. Yeah, I think, I think if an analyst is using SQL every day, you're probably covering a lot of the foundational material in SQL fundamentals. And so you could probably be fine to jump into advanced if you want to learn, you know, brand new topics or topics that maybe you've heard of and don't have as much experience in.

⁓ but I will say even, even just developing SQL fundamentals and revamping the course, even for me, it was a refresher in some topics. ⁓ going back and we cover such a wide base of things that if you're on the fence, maybe it's worth going back, going through, having a really solid like refresher and everything so you're up to speed and then you can confidently jump in to the advanced course. Meeyeon And if there are any particularly fun parts of the course that are memorable for you as the author, without giving away too much, ⁓ could you share with us a couple highlights for you that are in this course?

Joseph Yeates Thank Yeah, I think the one that comes to mind right away is in one of the chapters, we look at ⁓ data modeling and thinking about how we can structure our SQL queries in semantic layers. So basically what that means is how can we break down all of the data transformation or manipulation that we want to do into sort of modular steps? So if we're pulling data from a database, we just want to ⁓ extract that data somewhere. And then we need, we need to clean it up a little bit.

And then we apply our business logic at the end and we sort of separate those things into different steps because that lets us share our work with others. Everything is really clean and organized and it's really the modern way to approach some of these ⁓ data tasks. And it's applicable across a range of different technology stacks. So although we're using, ⁓ Although we're using SQL Server in this course, and again, we're just using like an example data set, all the skills learned are relevant to whatever ⁓ data warehousing or modern database tools that you may be using with your own data or within your organization.

Meeyeon There you have it, folks. ⁓ If you are interested in taking your SQL skills to the next level, this is going to be the course for you. Thanks for joining us on this episode of What's New at CFI. I hope that this has piqued your interest in our next SQL course.

And until next time, we will see you all very soon. So if SQL fundamentals was really authored in mind of like helping the analyst develop fundamental skills to build data reports, then what is advanced SQL do? Joseph Yeates Yeah. Yeah.

So I think for the, the shift on the advanced side is going from allowing analysts to do, as you say, to sort of, do their job and to answer specific questions with the data that they're pulling. And with advanced, we're touching on skills that maybe it's more in the realm of data engineering or database administration. And it allows the analyst to ⁓ either communicate and collaborate more effectively with those teams. or even take on some of those roles and responsibilities themselves as they upskill in those areas.