How many times have you started off building a complicated analytical SQL query like this? SELECT … . uh??? . . SELECT * FROM … SELECT … And you get stuck trying to figure out exactly what you want to select. You’re thinking about averages, group by’s, the order of your results or some change you want to see over time and the query editor is just sitting there, taunting you, because in SQL, you have to know up front what you want to select into your final results.

If you are a software engineer and you have just enough SQL to write queries that count, sum, average join and maybe sub-select, then I’m writing this post for you. If, when you need more complicated analysis or computation, you pull your query results into excel or your favorite scripting language to do more processing, then I have some good news.

There’s a whole lot more you can do right in SQL and it’s not too bad to learn how to do it.

In this post, I’m going to cover a few concepts that have recently helped me do more computation, better analysis, and it turns out, more efficient querying…and I hope they help you too.