Zansa › Answers › Integration and BI tools
What SQL skills does a small business need for reporting?
For most reporting, the essentials are SELECT with filtering, joins, grouping and aggregation, date handling, and CASE expressions. Window functions and common table expressions are useful extras. With those, an analyst can answer most business questions from a well-modelled database.
Learning order:
- SELECT, WHERE, ORDER BY.
- GROUP BY with SUM, COUNT, AVG.
- JOINs and understanding row multiplication.
- Dates and string functions.
- CASE for categorising.
- CTEs for readable, step-by-step queries.
- Window functions for rankings and running totals.
With a good BI tool, many staff can ask questions without any SQL, but at least one person who reads SQL helps greatly in checking numbers and debugging mismatches.
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