Introduction

Data collection and analysis is an old practice going back to the beginning of civilization. Records from ancient Egyptian papyrus suggest that pharaohs collected census information from villages, possibly to determine the number of soldiers that could be enlisted for the war. However, it was after the arrival of modern computers that the art of data analytics became a significant phenomenon that is changing people's lives every day.

This book, as its name suggests, teaches you how to use Structured Query Language (SQL) for data analytics. SQL is the tool that you will be focusing on in the rest of the book. But before diving into SQL, this chapter will provide an overview of data analytics. You will be introduced to fundamental concepts such as the definition and type of statistics and different methods of statistics, which will lay the foundation for the concepts that future chapters will be based on, define the purpose of the SQL operations that you will learn...