Intro to Databases for Business Analytics

NOTE: This is a hybrid online/offline course consisting of one and a half (1.5) hours of online video and one and a half (1.5) hours of in-person class time per week. Watching the online videos is mandatory and must be completed before the in-person class each week. Course Description We don’t think about databases much, right? At least not when they’re working right. But they’re all around us. They’re in every product we use. And when they don’t work (think about the iCloud, LinkedIn, or Ashley Madison data breaches in which hundreds of millions of emails and passwords were exposed) the consequences can be extreme. Every modern company stores their data in a database (it’s like a really big version of Excel), and if you want to analyze the data, you may be expected to know how to access it yourself. In fact, at many companies are requiring even their business leaders to have an understanding of databases. At the very least, knowing how to set up and interact with databases will improve your ability to GSD (get stuff done), strengthen your understanding of how technology works, and make you less of a pain for developers to work with. In this class, we’ll explore basic SQL (the most common database language) for business analytics. At the end of the course, students should have a deeper understanding of how databases work, how they fit into the general technology stack, how to connect to databases, and know how to browse and exporting data from databases.