Practical Predictive Analytics

SQL

SQL has been referred to as a universal query language. One of the reasons to learn SQL is that it has a relatively common syntax that runs on a variety of operating systems. Most importantly, knowledge of SQL is paramount for communicating ideas with managers who are familiar with it. While queries can also be done natively in R via native tools and packages, I prefer SQL as a first query language since work performed using SQL in R can then be modified to run natively within other systems, where the code can be optimized in its native environment, in order to make it run faster.