By Peter Liu and Parth Kulkarni – 10/21/2015
SQL (Structured Query Language) is everywhere, and in today’s digitized world with massive amounts of data being gathered every day and stored into a database, knowing how to program with SQL is imperative. Whether you’re a data analyst or a management student, SQL is a great language to learn.
The Workshop on SQL was conducted by Parth Kulkarni and Peter Liu. Both Parth and Peter are BAPM students that joined the program in Fall 2014. Parth and Peter did their summer internship at Ebay in California. They worked on SQL during their internship and thought it would be useful to the current students if they shared their experience and knowledge with them. This workshop was conceptualized to give students a thorough understanding of how SQL is being used across industries on a day to day basis. It will also cover typical SQL use cases (calculating conversion rate, moving average, customer lifetime value (CLV), RFM (recency, frequency, monetization) etc.
The workshop was designed assuming that students have a prior working knowledge on relational databases, typical DML commands (Select statement), usage of groupings and aggregate functions and understanding of SQL joins.
Parth conducted the first hour of the workshop wherein he covered all the basic concepts and syntax of SQL that are most widely used. For instance, create, update, drop, delete, select, etc. He explained how to use write queries incorporating where, group by, having, and order by clauses. He touched upon the different types of joins, subqueries – their two types and derived tables. Through the session, Parth provided examples of common interview questions related to the topics. The next half hour of the workshop was taken by Peter, where he explained with examples of queries web analytics that he did for Ebay as part of his internship. It was interesting to see how much of analytics can be done using SQL. The workshop session was very engaging. Once again, the survey responses we received for the workshop were very positive. The workshop was organized and content was presented clearly. It was a refresher for those with basic knowledge of SQL.