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Excel can't handle larger data sets. SQL is also more adept at managing multiple related tables/spreadsheets
Never too late to learn. Sql and excel are very different tools. Sql is a language to query Databases. Its good for large data sets and more complicated analysis.
SQL is mainly for pulling cuts of data from a data warehouse and doing some basic aggregation or cleaning. You don't really use SQL for the same things you use Excel for
C1, if you routinely work with big datasets you use SQL for almost all the same things you do in Excel. It's more than just a query language. Has fairly robust calculation, data manipulation, and aggregation/reporting capabilities.
It's always good to keep your feet on the ground with technical skills. If you ever find yourself out of a job, knowing how to code and how to work with data will make you quite marketable.
A good goal if you just want to get the hang of SQL is to read in 2 tables and join them by reproducing a vlookup (and then see how much easier it is to do the match on multiple fields). Do a left, right, inner, and outer join and understand the difference.
Select top 1 * from employees where skill like '%sql%' order by hiredate; the answer lies in computational capacity. The access & excel limits of ~1M records is not enough for most data analytics requirements. Also most IT dept have a sql data hub these days that can crunch data 10000 times faster then a laptop. Therefore dumping 5M records into a sql table is preferred to 5 access databases or text files or other such data transfers.
OP depends on the data, but it probably would not be a one step solution as in excel. you can however build everything you need. If you have less then 50k records, excel would likely be much easier in this regard. If you have over 2Gb of data It would be worthwhile to have it in sql. You can also run ETL in any number of programming languages on top of it including vba. My preference is python as it has prebuilt every function you can possibly imagine... but it's also not the work we should be doing at the consultant level. This should be outsourced to IT support. In any case, I vote for learning sql. It's not going to take long and it's not going anywhere.
SQL is really easy to learn too
But tbh if it's not something you want to do day in day out I wouldn't invest too much time into it at your level. Basic understanding is great especially to understand the limitations and effort it takes for your minions to complete asks, but beyond that it's like anything else a good skill level is only achieved with training and experience imo. For the basics Google learn sql the hard way. Great crash course
Slightly tangential...Almost killed an M before because he pretty much wanted the entire enterprise warehouse dumped into an excel sheet and didn't get that frequent changes to the outcome dataset required the team to pull late nights for no valid reason besides his ignorance
I'm a M and learned SQL as an Analyst. It's extremely helpful especially now bc I can help my analysts troubleshoot. It doesn't take that long to learn enough to be effective.
I once had to do an overnight Tableau extract because my M wanted to review the data offline. Then when the data changed she went all ballistic on me for lacking attention to detail.
Thanks all. D4 - that's interesting. Obv there are variations but how long would it take to get the hang of it? And what's an example problem that could be solved with SQL when applied to a database?
Yeah I agree SC1, hence the q. I used to be pretty good with excel and VBA back in the day but all these young bucks are biting at my feet
Useful content. Thanks. So SQL can do volume sorting and cleansing of data. Does it have the same arithmetic agility as Excel? E.g. Can I construct a revenue model for a passenger flight or can I calculate the MWh yield from a solar array? (I can do those in Excel using sumproducts, matrix multi, compounding/discounting variables. Does SQL have similar functions?)
OP, standard SQL works on records, lines, and aggregation. You can do all those things, but the can get cumbersome or convoluted with multiple steps/interim tables required, especially when you're not 100% sure what you're doing when you start.