MODE Analytics — SQL Data Analysis

Data Analysis is a very vital aspect in the domain of Business Intelligence. To retrieve the data present in a database is one of the skills that’s required for BI. But for data to be analyzed, we would need some graphical elements such as graphs and charts.

For beginners into this domain, who have some acquaintance with SQL, it might appear new to visualize the data resulting from SQL queries in the form of graphical representation. So, here is a place on the internet that introduces you to the arena of data analysis through SQL.

It is MODE Analytics.

If you’re a beginner with SQL, this website also helps you in learning it. There are detailed tutorials for exactly that purpose.

If you’re already familiar with SQL, and wanting to dive directly into the data analysis side of it, then you can go ahead and click on the Explore option present at the top of the page.

There you can find, under the Data area, many Public Tables as shown in the following screen shot.

These public tables are various databases uploaded by various users. (You can also upload your own database; more on that later.)

You can click on any of the public tables that you wish and it will take you to the actual data in that table. Here, you can see a preview of the data, the schema of the table and also some reports that are previously generated by various users.

To fire a query and generate a report, click on the Query button.

It will take you to the SQL query editor where a sample query (SELECT *) is present by default.

Click on Run to see the results. The retrieved data from the table that you’re currently working on will be displayed.

To see the visual analysis of the data in the chart format, click on Show Chart.

This will generate a report for the data retrieved by the query. (From more, select Rotate Label at 45 to adust the labels on the X-axis)

So, once you do this, your data would look something like the following:

That right there is the visual representation of the data you’ve fired through your SQL query. This is how MODE Analytics can help you learn analyzing data through SQL.

You can write your own queries in the query editor and check for the insights that you might want to search for in the data.

Now, talking of the data, let us now quickly take a look at how to upload your own database into MODE.

Click on the Add Data option at the top of the page. This will take you to the data upload page.

The easy way to upload a database into MODE is to upload a CSV file.

Try collecting the open data available from major organizations like World Bank, where you can download large datasets of opendata (free data) in CSV and other formats.

When you download a CSV file to upload it into MODE, note that the column names of the table should be present in the first row in the CSV file followed by the actual data; else MODE might display an error while uploading.

Once you upload a file successfully, it would ask you to give desired names and data types for each column, and subsequently gets your database ready for analysis.

This way, you can take a shot at understanding how SQL data analysis works!