Learn SQL Basics for Data Science Specialization

As data collection has increased exponentially, so has the need for people skilled at using and interacting with data; to be able to think critically, and provide insights to make better decisions and optimize their businesses. This is a data scientist, “part mathematician, part computer scientist, and part trend spotter” (SAS Institute, Inc.). According to Glassdoor, being a data scientist is the best job in America; with a median base salary of $110,000 and thousands of job openings at a time. The skills necessary to be a good data scientist include being able to retrieve and work with data, and to do that you need to be well versed in SQL, the standard language for communicating with database systems.

This course is designed to give you a primer in the fundamentals of SQL and working with data so that you can begin analyzing it for data science purposes. You will begin to ask the right questions and come up with good answers to deliver valuable insights for your organization. This course starts with the basics and assumes you do not have any knowledge or skills in SQL. It will build on that foundation and gradually have you write both simple and complex queries to help you select data from tables. You'll start to work with different types of data like strings and numbers and discuss methods to filter and pare down your results. You will create new tables and be able to move data into them. You will learn common operators and how to combine the data. You will use case statements and concepts like data governance and profiling. You will discuss topics on data, and practice using real-world programming assignments. You will interpret the structure, meaning, and relationships in source data and use SQL as a professional to shape your data for targeted analysis purposes. Although we do not have any specific prerequisites or software requirements to take this course, a simple text editor is recommended for the final project. So what are you waiting for? This is your first step in landing a job in the best occupation in the US and soon the world!

This course allows you to apply the SQL skills taught in “SQL for Data Science” to four increasingly complex and authentic data science inquiry case studies. We'll learn how to convert timestamps of all types to common formats and perform date/time calculations. We'll select and perform the optimal JOIN for a data science inquiry and clean data within an analysis dataset by deduping, running quality checks, backfilling, and handling nulls. We'll learn how to segment and analyze data per segment using windowing functions and use case statements to execute conditional logic to address a data science inquiry. We'll also describe how to convert a query into a scheduled job and how to insert data into a date partition. Finally, given a predictive analysis need, we'll engineer a feature from raw data using the tools and skills we've built over the course. The real-world application of these skills will give you the framework for performing the analysis of an AB test.

This course is for students with SQL experience and now want to take the next step in gaining familiarity with distributed computing using Spark. Students will gain an understanding of when to use Spark and how Spark as an engine uniquely combines Data and AI technologies at scale. The four modules build on one another and by the end of the course the student will understand: Spark architecture, Spark DataFrame, optimizing reading/writing data, and how to build a machine learning model. The first module will introduce Spark, including how Spark works with distributed computing and what are Spark Dataframes. Module 2 covers the core concepts of Spark such as storage vs. computing, caching, partitions and Spark UI. The third module looks at Engineering Data Pipelines covering connecting to databases, schemas and type, file formats and writing good data. The final module looks at the application of Spark with Machine Learning through the business use case, a short introduction to what machine learning is, building and applying models and a final course conclusion. By understanding when to use Spark, either scaling out when the model or data is too large to process on a single machine, or having a need to simply speed up to get faster results, students will hone their SQL skills and become a more adept Data Scientist.