What’s New at CFI | SQL Fundamentals

Meeyeon (00:00)
Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of What’s New at CFI. Today I am here with Joseph, who you are familiar with in some of our business intelligence and data analytics courses generally. Joseph, welcome back to our podcast of What’s New.

Joseph Yeates (00:16)
Thanks, man. Happy to be here.

Meeyeon (00:17)
Today we’re going to talk about a course that you all may be familiar with. It is called SQL Fundamentals. This course has had a refresh, a facelift, a revamp, so to speak, and we want to share what we’ve done with this course with you all. So what I want to do is ask you, Joseph, about at a high level, what is the new SQL Fundamentals course about?

Has anything changed drastically from what we had originally, and who’s it designed for?

Joseph Yeates (00:51)
Yeah, so I would say the new, the refreshed version of SQL fundamentals is best described probably as a streamlined version of what we had before. We’re really focusing on the most applicable content for the widest range of audience really. So whether you’re in a business intelligence role, whether you’re in a database role, whether even if you’re in…

a finance role or sort of other verticals of an organization that might touch SQL, we wanted to make the just everything in this course applicable to you. So we’re focusing on reading data from a database to answer questions. So no matter where those questions come from in a business, these skills can help you answer those questions by pulling data using SQL.

Meeyeon (01:42)
And for some of us, coming here, some of our listeners are probably coming here very specifically because they have an interest in SQL, their line of work requires that they learn it. But for listeners who might not have a technical background and are just curious, can you share with them what SQL is all about? What exactly is it?

Joseph Yeates (01:59)
Absolutely. So, so SQL stands for structured query language. you might also hear it referred to as SQL and, really what it is, it’s a language to talk to and communicate to data that lives in a database. So no matter what application you use for your day job, there’s a really good chance that the data on the backend lives in a database somewhere. And so we can use SQL to talk to that database and retrieve data directly to interact with it, to answer questions and to do analysis. So I think that sort of SQL in a nutshell.

Meeyeon (02:40)
And are there any, and this can be very, very broad strokes, but are there a couple examples you can give us of the types of questions or business problems that SQL can help professionals answer?

Joseph Yeates (02:55)
Yeah, really the range is almost limitless. The limit does not exist, if you will. If the data exists in the database, in the background, and you have access to the tables that exist in, and you can pull it in, you can answer questions. And what’s nice is that SQL is a really flexible language. So if you’re interested in sales over time, as an example, as a common use case, you might pull in

a date column or date information to see, you know, these are the years we’re interested in. And then you might pull in sales information, but with SQL, you can pull in sales information, whether that’s from one of your in-house systems, maybe you have a system in the cloud. Maybe you have, you know, like an online business and you have some sales on the internet, and SQL allows us to connect to all those different sources and bring all that together. So you can have like a, a total view of your business as opposed to relying on independent systems that you might have multiple.

Meeyeon (04:02)
Now I’ve only used SQL I think like once or twice in my life at the very beginning of my career. I want to say in portfolio management, but it sounds like clearly a very practical skill, at least one I’ve used in a very limited capacity, but it seemed very practical. How would you say that SQL fits into the broader analytics stack that people have today? So alongside tools like Excel, Power BI, of course, and Python.

Joseph Yeates (04:31)
Yeah. So I guess Excel, Power BI, Python are all more data analysis and data visualization tools are like really common uses for those. And SQL kind of fits in a step before that when we’re using, within analytics or when we’re, when we’re looking at data that before we can, use those tools, we need to get data into Excel. need to get data into Power BI. We need to connect to data with Python.

And that’s what SQL allows us to do is it allows us to connect to data sources, again, usually databases. We can do some basic structuring of our data, filtering of our data before we land it into an Excel or Power BI. And then those tools are really meant for data analysis. So it’s really sort of setting the table with SQL. And then we can move forward with whatever tool that we choose. And that’s really why SQL is so applicable that

there’s lots of data visualization tools. There’s lots of data analysis tools. But SQL is the language of structured and stored data to access it. So all those tools interact with SQL really well because SQL is the language to connect to data to bring them in.

Meeyeon (05:53)
And OK, I might have to cut this out, Sorin, because this is a very random example. But let’s see if it works. So I’m wondering maybe if I could pull an example from a course that I’ve recently done that I’m familiar with, but a topic that’s unfortunately, still very relevant in our current news today.

If I’m to pull out a real-world business example where SQL is used to analyze business data, let’s say that there’s a scenario where there is a large manufacturing company, whether it is hardware or retail goods, and they’re facing some issues with pricing due to global tariffs. In that context, could you maybe give us an example of a query or some sort of setup, some sort of insight someone might build after completing this course?

That might be way too specific. Let’s look at, let’s skip that one. Okay.

Joseph Yeates (06:54)
Yeah… Yeah, okay.

Meeyeon (07:02)
So one thing I want to talk about, and not to focus on it too much, but I think some of our listeners might have taken the original SQL fundamentals, but might be coming back to see what is new with this course. Can you walk us through the kinds of topics that learners will cover in this course without giving away too much?

Joseph Yeates (07:22)
Yeah. Yeah. So the, we, we start the course with a focus on six of the key words of SQL or of querying data with SQL. and that covers how we can select the type of data that we need, how we can filter it down, define where that data is coming from, and then if we need to aggregate it in any way. So, we sort of cover some of those foundational basics that

whether you’re using SQL every day or very rarely, you’ll be using these keywords. So it’s relevant, really, to anyone using SQL. And after we built that foundation, we expand on those keywords. We take a look at a sort of high-level overview of a lot of different things that help expand those keywords. We look at functions that can help us deal with dates, some functions that can help us with numeric

data types and with text or string data types. And then we wrap up dealing with data from multiple tables. So we sort of go from really what are these basic words, we expand on them, we do look at lots of different functions that can help us with lots of different use cases, and then we look to see how we can bring data together from lots of different places.

Meeyeon (08:41)
That sounds like fun. And for our listeners, this is going to be a personal question for the subject matter expert teaching this course, but how did you personally get into SQL?

Joseph Yeates (08:53)
Yeah, the first time I encountered SQL was actually at university. I had a course dedicated to SQL. So some of these key words and foundational concepts, that’s the first time that I encountered them. And even though I took the course and going through coursework, I sort of knew what I was doing, but maybe it wasn’t until I started in my first business intelligence role and actually had a real database to connect to and real

practical questions and examples that I was using that I sort of connected the dots and put the pieces together a little bit. And then after I started working with SQL that way, I took a database administration certification. So I did a really deep dive into SQL. And I just feel like it really rounded me out as an analyst. Like I had good analysis skills. I had some good visualization skills. And even though I was working in a company that did have a database

team, like we had data engineers, had DBAs, database administrators. By learning more of those SQL skills, I was able to talk and collaborate with them a lot better. I could speak their language, I could make suggestions, could, yeah, it really rounded out my skill set. And so I, yeah, I still use SQL almost every day when I’m working now. And I don’t think that’s gonna change anytime soon.

Meeyeon (10:16)
Do you remember that first time that SQL helped you solve a real-life problem at work? Do you remember what that problem was, by any chance?

Joseph Yeates (10:27)
I don’t remember specifically, but I do remember the first time thinking like, wow, this is why it’s really cool. And it was, I was just in an Excel mindset in an Excel world. And I was, you know, trying to use VLOOKUP at the time to connect data from two different sources, two different tables. I was just like copy pasting it into Excel. And I was just trying to bring this data together. And it was, I was just sort of getting stuck.

Really. And the reason was I wasn’t using the right tool. And then as soon as I moved that data ingestion and light transformation into SQL, the query ran in like five seconds or something. And it was something I was stuck doing for a day or a couple of days in Excel, just knocking my head against the wall, trying to work. And it was like, okay, perfect. Like this, this is why people use this. This is why it exists. So, I don’t remember the exact

problem I was trying to solve, but it was definitely that understanding of, yeah, this is why SQL is useful.

Meeyeon (11:31)
And on that note, for someone learning SQL for the very first time by taking this course today, what advice would you give them?

Joseph Yeates (11:43)
Ooh, I would say we have built the course to be as hands-on and have as much practice baked in as possible. It’s one thing watching someone else or reading about the theory of SQL, but the sooner that you can connect to, whether it’s like an example demo database with real-world data or connect to…

a database within your company or just personally, if you have access to that, the quicker you can do that, the better, I would say, is that, you know, as soon as you know a little bit to get started, like just a little bit to be dangerous, that’s when you should start going in and practicing and making mistakes and learning. And that, in my opinion, that’s the quickest way that you’re going to get up to speed, really with any technical language. But what’s great about SQL is you can see your results

right away from the data you’re trying to bring in. So you can really get going quickly because you can really see just the output of what you’re trying to do pretty much instantly.

Meeyeon (12:49)
And it sounds like when you had that first use with SQL, and you were trying to initially solve that problem in Excel, and it wasn’t working out, you used SQL, and it seems like you had a really big mindset shift. Would you kind of describe it as that way?

Joseph Yeates (13:07)
Yeah, I think that’s probably fair. And it was just learning where some of these tools fit in your process as an analyst, really. I would say in a similar way, if you need to visualize data, Excel might be the tool in some circumstances, but it might not be. And the same thing with extracting data, transforming it a little bit.

Maybe Power BI works, maybe Python works, maybe Excel works, but sometimes you might need SQL for it. So it’s just learning how you can really play to the strengths of some of these tools and some of these languages.

Meeyeon (13:47)
That sounds like so much fun. And so for those of you listening, if you are looking to step outside of the box, try something apart from Excel if that’s where you’ve been living. I highly encourage you to check this out. I think this could be a great tool to add to your toolkit. And until next time, okay, I have such a bad outro.

See ya.

And until next time, thanks for listening, and we will see you in the next one.