Member-only story
Use SQL to find specific names and states in a bigquery dataset
After having studied Python for four years, I thought it would be wise to add another string to my bough and study SQL.
Structured query language (SQL) is a domain specific language used to manage data, especially in a relational database management system (RDBMS). It is particularly useful in handling structured data. SQL was introduced in the 1970’s, and has two advantages over its predecessors, being:-
- It introduced the concept of accessing many records with one single command.
- It eliminates the need to specify how to reach a record, with or without an index.
What I have recently learned is that the data science company, Kaggle, offers the user the opportunity to use SQL in a bigquery dataset. In addition, Kaggle also offers the user a mini-course on how to program in SQL. I have initially been going through the mini-course in an attempt to familiarise myself with the language, and I no doubt will be going through other courses in time.
One thing that I have learned about using bigquery datasets in a Kaggle Jupyter Notebook is the fact that the SQL code is sandwiched between python code, making it easier for me to learn the language.
