My first follow-along project

A reflection on my first SQL project with Alex the Analyst

Feeling fairly confident in my understanding of SQL, I decided to follow along with Alex's first portfolio project to see how I fared. So far, my projects have been guided by the Coursera courses I've been taking.

Getting Microsoft SQL and server installed and communicating, then Excel imported, may have been the hardest part of it all. I finally got that figured out.

After exploring some of the data in Excel, we moved on to querying in SQL.

This project uses data from the Covid pandemic. We started out by exploring the data and percentages of infections and deaths.

It was gratifying that I was able to listen and code alongside Alex, rather than stopping at every line to copy. I understood what he was saying to do!

Some things I learned along this video were how to CAST before doing an aggregate function, different ways to consider which function to choose, and JOINing tables on multiple columns.

Brand new things to me were OVER, PARTITION, and using CTE/VIEWS. I'm very happy to have been exposed to these new (to me) functions!

By the end of this video, I had a functioning SQL program, data to query and analyze, and a view with information that can be used in a vizualization (next video). I'm excited to get a better understanding of importing the data into Tableau and creating a visual to help explain the data.

I use comments a lot. A LOT A LOT. They help me track my thinking. Honestly, it's something I did in teaching a lot too. I would keep my train of though in the speaker's notes on Slides so that I knew the direction I was going when I looked at it later.

It was really useful to me to see Alex comment out his code the way that he did. I also really love that it was an uncut production, that the mistakes and learning opportunities were left in so I could watch troubleshooting the code at work.

If you're curious about my final result, it can be viewed here.