I will add something out of my own experience. You absolutely want to be a data base owner as a Data Analyst. Of course, you don't want to mess up with the ERP system or the currently existing data warehouse. However, it is ALWAYS possible (don't believe them if they tell you otherwise) to get a small isolated database on one of the company's servers and get a database management tool installed (they are freeware so it is all about getting an IT permission). Use your database to store parts of business logic, which otherwise exist in Excel or are calculated on reporting level: alternative hierarchies, manual number patches, some alternative descriptions etc. Also if you are in need to perform a large calculation, which is slowing your reporting software down, do it in your database. That way your reporting software (I use PBI primarily) gets ready to serve data and the performance of your reports gets a big boost.
I would love to see a video tutorial on how to connect Navicat with a relational database such as MySQL or Oracle and how to use Navicat. Your videos are great! Keep up the good work, Adam!
The easiest work horse for such data wrangling is the humble msaccess - it can connect to any data source that has an odbc driver. With that you can do amaazing transformations of daaata using its very eaasy query GUI. Summarizing , creating new sub datasets , creating new fks and joining - ay thing you can think of in sql can be done with its GUI
With tools like PowerQuery and PowerBI (modelling within a report) that requires no code and is very user friendly, what's the advantage of still using SQL to extract and load data? I get the impression it's achieving the same goal but adding an extra step into a pipeline?
Whereas I agree tools like the ones you mention are getting more advanced, they can only take you so far. You will still need to know SQL to manage and administer SQL databases and create more advanced queries to model your data.
SQL is critical because you can write more complex and targeted querys to power your visualization tools. It has a bunch of tools for doing this like Window Functions. With SQL the database can do much of the data processing work leading to faster rendering of the reports by your visualization tools.
