Forget About Excel, High Five With SQL
By: Vertabelo Academy
Tags: Sql, Industry, Excel, It, Data

by Adrian Więch

Find out why you should forget about Excel and start using SQL even if you’re not an IT expert. We’ll show you how easy it is to learn SQL, how it can make you work better, and how Vertabelo Academy makes the learning process fun.

“I Don’t Deal With Data”

We frequently hear the sentence above from people outside the IT industry. Well, it’s not entirely true. Data is now almost everywhere. No matter what job you do or what industry you work for, you surely deal with information everyday. Just think about it — information about your customers, suppliers, users, the goods you sell, the services you offer, or the orders you process. All of the data should be stored somewhere, and modern companies typically store information digitally. They often use what is called a relational database such as Microsoft SQL Server or PostgreSQL.

If you think it’s difficult to work with databases, you’re wrong! It’s actually pretty easy, and you don’t really need to be an IT specialist to get started. You don’t even need a technical educational background! All that you need to start analyzing the data you have more efficiently is a little knowledge of SQL. SQL is the most common and universal database language in the world. This means that once you learn SQL, you can talk to almost any relational database available on the market.

SQL for Your Job

We already know that data is everywhere. At Vertabelo Academy, we believe that most professions can benefit from analyzing datasets using SQL. Below, we present a few examples of how SQL may help you improve your work.

Analytics. It doesn’t really matter what kind of analysis you perform at work, be it financial analysis or market analysis. One thing is certain — you can use SQL to create reports and quickly get valuable information about the business objects you work with.

Marketing. Modern marketing is definitely data-driven. For instance, imagine you’ve got massive amounts of data related to customer behavior. This data can help answer questions such as: how many customers opened an email I sent? Or: how many people ordered a specific product after we ran a promotional campaign? SQL can definitely help you create reports which show conversion rates and customer engagement in no time at all.

Sales. In the sales department, getting to the right people or companies is crucial. If you want to turn them into your customers, you need to collect and analyze a lot of data about them. What do they need? What kinds of companies do they typically do business with? How much revenue can they generate? Yet again, such insights shown in SQL reports can help you unlock your true sales potential.

Tax Consultancy. Working in this industry typically means running a lot of analyses to calculate potential amounts of taxes and benefits. Such calculations can be used, for example, to find out where a multinational company should open their next office to maximize revenue. Because state or country-level calculations usually involve dealing with vast amounts of data, SQL is an excellent choice to run those calculations efficiently.

Logistics. Logistics is a field which uses many reports to monitor stocks, inventories, and supply chains. These reports are frequently created with specialized software that typically only allows generating a limited number of reports. SQL is a natural choice for work improvement here. You’ll be able to model the reports on your own and process larger amounts of data at the same time.

Isn’t Excel Good Enough?

We all know that Microsoft Excel is a great tool which can help analyze data and create various kinds of reports, but it certainly has its limitations. It’s not really designed to process millions or billions of rows. Have you ever had a problem with Excel crashing because you simply wanted to process too much data? Have you ever seen how the entire operating system slows down while Excel processes data? Take a look at SQL databases, then! They are designed to work efficiently with vast amounts of data. You will never have to worry about running out of memory again.

SQL Is Not Difficult!

If you ever tried to learn a programming language like Java or Python and decided you’re not cut out for it, we’ve got good news — SQL is much easier because it’s mostly a query language. What this means is that you don’t need to think about how to retrieve data, you only need to think about what data you need exactly. The database engine will take care of finding the best way to give you the data you want. SQL uses English words and reads pretty much like English sentences once you get the hang of it. Just take a look at our best-selling SQL Basics course — it only takes ten hours to complete!

Become an Independent Specialist

Employees from various departments often turn to IT teams at their companies with requests related to databases. “Hey, could you retrieve this and that for me from the database and put it in a CSV file?” is a phrase you may sometimes use. The problem is that IT teams usually have their own tasks and might take a lot of time to fulfill your requests. Once you learn SQL, you can become independent and run your own queries rather than wait for more technical staff to help you.

Write Once, Rerun as Needed

The code you’ll write can be saved and run again at any time. This means that no matter how complicated your SQL report will be, you’ll be able to save the code that generated the report and use it again in the future when your data changes in the database. Imagine how much time you normally devote in Excel or similar tools every time you need to analyze a dataset. First, you need to import the data, then sort it, filter some values, delete unwanted rows… this process takes a lot of time! With SQL, you simply write the code once, save it and rerun it whenever you need. Just imagine the amount of time you can save!

How Can Vertabelo Academy Help?

Vertabelo Academy is a thriving e-learning platform which offers many SQL courses both for complete beginners and for more advanced users. You don’t need an IT background or any specialized software to get started. All that you need is an Internet connection and a web browser. We believe in learning by doing — this is why each piece of theory is backed with interactive exercises. The code you write to solve the exercises is verified immediately after you finish, which means you get instant feedback and can improve continuously.

You can start with our most popular SQL Basics course, which has nearly 60,000 satisfied students so far. The course takes approximately 10 hours to complete and teaches you everything you need to know to get started with SQL.

High Five with SQL

If you feel like learning more than just the basics, we’ve got good news for you! You can get our SQL Complete Track bundle which contains not one but nine SQL courses. This is the most comprehensive SQL bundle you can find on the Web!Inside the bundle, you’ll find:

SQL Basics, our most popular course which deals with selecting data from databases. A real must-have for everyone.

SQL Practice set, which contains additional exercises that will help you become more fluent at writing SQL queries.

SQL JOINs, which provides more detailed information on how you can join multiple tables in SQL.

Standard SQL Functions, which teaches you how to apply typical functions to get even more out of your queries.

How to INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE Data in SQL. All the courses mentioned above teach you how to retrieve data. This course, in turn, explains how you can insert data into the database, update it, and delete it.

Creating Tables in SQL. In relational databases, data is stored in tables. This course teaches you how you can create your own tables.

Window functions, a course about more advanced features such as rankings or running sums. This is the only interactive course on window functions that you can find on the Internet!

on window functions that you can find on the Internet! Recursive queries, a course about the most challenging type of SQL query. It teaches you how to process trees and graphs in SQL, and how to organize long queries.

PostGIS, a course about how you can work with maps in SQL, find restaurants nearby, or calculate distances between two points.

This bundle will turn you into a real SQL hero — you can start with absolutely no knowledge of databases and become an advanced SQL user once you finish all the courses.

Get all of the courses at once for a discounted price here.