5.3 Summary

This chapter’s projects covered two following essential skills:

• Building SQL databases. This includes building a representative of a production database, as well as building a test database.

• Extracting data from SQL databases.

This requires learning some SQL, of course. SQL is sometimes called the lingua franca of data processing. Many organizations have SQL databases, and the data must be extracted for analysis.

Also important is learning to work in the presence of precious production data. It’s important to consider the naming conventions, file system paths, and permissions associated with database servers and the files in use. Attempting to extract analytic data is not a good reason for colliding with production operations.

The effort required to write an acceptance test that uses an ephemeral database is an important additional skill. Being able to create databases for test purposes permits debugging by identifying problematic data, creating a test case...