What Is SQL?

One of the most powerful tools a data analyst / scientist / engineers or anybody can have is learning the language of SQL. Now this is not a SQL tutorial, but more so an understanding of what SQL can be used for as well as the value that this language has in the real world. First off, let’s define SQL, so let’s look at this definition that I copied straight from Wikipedia:

“Structured Query Language)[5] is a domain-specific language used in programming and designed for managing data held in a relational database management system (RDBMS), or for stream processing in a relational data stream management system (RDSMS). It is particularly useful in handling structured data, i.e. data incorporating relations among entities and variables.”

Now, in my experience as both a data analyst & data scientist, having this language in your arsenal is so important and can really make you stand out to an employer. This language allows you to pretty much programmatically handle large amounts of data, what does this mean? Well let’s imagine for your job you had to handle large amounts of excel files, sometimes you had to download them from one website, or maybe get them from your boss, and maybe some files were different formats, before you know it you have many different files housing similar data that maybe important to the project, now imagine if you had a centralized location of all of your data in any order…