For this week’s blog, I want to focus on a few questions I think a lot of people in the data world take for granted: What the heck is a database, why can’t you just use excel, and what the heck is SQL anyway?

If you work in data, you probably understand this really well. We definitely do at Querio. Most people though do not, and they really don’t need to anyway. If you don’t know this already, Querio is the best way for teams to work with data, regardless of their technical level. This means we make sense if you can write queries in your sleep and obsess over load times, or if the most you’ve worked with data is formatting an excel sheet to a nice color.

One thing I love doing with friends, my parents, or customers, is giving them a first principle explanation of what all these things are. In typical Querio fashion, this article will get more technical as you keep reading so that there is something for everyone! We’re going to frame this in a really cliche fashion: running a lemonade stand. To get started,

What is a database?

Every business collects data, it’s important. The most basic thing you’d want to know running your lemonade stand is how much did you make? To do this, you need to keep track of every sale or transaction. Let’s say you put this on piece of paper. Everytime you sold something, you write down how much money you made.

Amazing! At the end of the day, you sit there and add up all the money you made. Then as you’re counting, someone comes up and wants lemonade! The only problem is you’re out of lemons. So you ask them to come by tomorrow.

The next day, you go to the grocery store, and you wonder how many lemons you sold? You have no idea. You buy more than you need, and you decide to now keep track of how many cups you’re selling so you know how much lemons to buy the next day.

You had an amazing day of sales. You celebrate and go out to dinner, ready to recharge for the next day. You go back to the store, and realized you spent so much money at dinner you can’t buy as many lemons as yesterday since you’re out of cash. Now you’re going to keep track of how much you spend on cups, lemons, and napkins to also know how much money you need.

I’ll stop with this story for now, but the point is there is a lot of data you naturally keep track of to run a business, and this usually only increases as you find more things you want to do well. This is what a database is, it’s a store of all the data you are collecting and instead of paper it is digital. It is really great for storing information we need. In databases, data is stored in tables, each with rows (individual transactions) and columns (specific details). For example, a table might have columns like “Name,” “amount,” “cups sold,” and “Purchase History,”

So what about excel?

In the modern day, we put this information in an excel sheet! For now, you can imagine excel is a type of database with extra nice stuff. You can create some columns, keep track of things, and pretty easily do things like add them up and make nice looking summaries of your business. Excel is all you need!

What if instead of lemonade, you’re now something ridiculous like Amazon, and now you’re selling millions of things an hour. Obviously, it’s unrealistic to have someone actually fill out every transaction. Imagine everytime someone bought something on Amazon someone had to go into excel and write their name, address, what they bought, how much etc. Instead of this, we have software automatically fill this out.

Well, fun fact but excel has a limit of around 1,000,000 rows. That means if you are Amazon, you need a new excel sheet (or a new piece of paper) every 30 seconds. So now excel really doesn’t work anymore. We have to use a proper database because they are designed for large amounts of data. We store things in a database, and it can handle billions of rows of all the transactions we’re doing.

But also Excel is something you can see. You can scroll through it, you can highlight columns, and do all of that fun stuff. What about a database though? What does it look like! Well as it turns out you can’t really ‘look’ at a database by just opening it on a computer. You can’t select a column or make a formula to sum everything up it just doesn’t fit. So instead, we need to ask for things with SQL.

How to write SQL

SQL, or Structued Query Language, is the standard ‘language’ for interacting with databases. We write SQL, which is a relative easy kind of code, to request things from a database. Let’s say I want to get all the sales I had in April. I’d have the question “What were my sales in April?”. Well the database doesn’t understand it, but it can understand SQL. It would look something like this:

SELECT SUM(sales)
FROM transactions
WHERE MONTH(date)

This tells the database to give me the

1. SUM of sales

2. FROM the table called transactions

3. WHERE the month of the date column is April.

Congratulations! You can now read SQL! That wasn’t so hard right?

Obviously there is a lot more to it with things like joining different tables together, knowing what tables you need in the first place, or doing more complex functions. But, in my (and Querio’s opinion) the hard part is knowing what you want and the getting the data part should be easy. This is why Querio’s AI let’s you ask the question “What were my sales in April?” and Querio writes the SQL for you. We handle the complexity so you can focus on running your business.

That’s not all we do of course, that data person on your team who you are sending your 15th Jira ticket to this month has much harder stuff to do, and they can write queries that even Querio will struggle with, so we have a whole list of tools that make their lives easier too.

That’s before we even open the can of worms including making reports, nice charts, python analysis, and so many other really cool stuff data can do. But i’ll cover that stuff another time. If you want your team, or yourself, to do your best work and get the most of your data, then you really should check us out! You can book a demo here, or email me directly at rami@querio.ai.

One last thing, i need to set the record straight, life DID NOT GIVE US LEMONS! We invented lemons ourselves ( lemons are a hybrid between a bitter orange and citron). So life will not give you answers directly, Querio is your lemon.