Wednesday, June 15, 2022

Convincing an Intern to Perform Data Science Tasks Using SQL

An intern has joined my client's company to work on a data science task. I will be helping her along the way. She is familiar with Python and R programming languages and has accomplished a number of projects with these tools. However, I have successfully convinced her that it is a good idea to learn database query language SQL and use it to perform most data work. The following are the four reasons that I mentioned:
  1. Unlike in academic environment, business data are mostly stored in relational databases. It is economical and secure to perform data analytics/data science jobs within databases using SQL.
  2. SQL language is standard. SQL scripts, with minor or no change,  can run on any relational databases such as Snowflake, Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, Postgresql, etc.
  3. Most of the data analytics/data science processes can be implemented in SQL and deployed in databases.
  4. SQL was developed over 50 years ago. It is still widely used and will continue to be so for many years to come. Not many programming language survived such a long period of time. It is a good investment to learn SQL.