Hey Reader, This week's newsletter is different. Not a regular "how to solve problem X with SQL" kinda thing. Because I've realized something: you can write perfect queries and still never get the career impact you want. You need "soft skills" like presenting your results to leadership in addition to "technical skills" like using CTEs and WINDOW functions. Let me show you what I mean. The Scenario Wednesday, 2pm. Q2 review meeting. CMO: "Our booking conversion is down. What's causing it?"...
11 days ago • 4 min read
Hello Reader, Imagine this scenario: Your CMO walks into Monday's meeting with a question: "I need to see our top 3 highest-revenue expeditions in EACH category - hiking, climbing, safari, cultural, and photography." Most analysts would write 5 separate queries, one per category. Or export to Excel and manually filter. An hour of work, minimum. Confident analysts write one query using window functions. Takes 3 minutes. Here's the skill that separates intermediate analysts from advanced ones....
18 days ago • 6 min read
Hello Reader, One thing before we get into this week's tutorial on the magic of JOINs: I launched a new job board -- just for data people! 🥳 It's called DataJobsOnline.com (creative, I know). And I have been building out the data base of jobs over the past few weeks: 405 Remote Data Analyst Jobs 182 Mid-Level Jobs that require "SQL" 183 Tableau Jobs 38 Data Jobs in London You get the idea...it's a job board! For data professionals like you. If you're not job hunting right now, but know...
25 days ago • 5 min read
Hey Reader -- I'm trying something new this week! Can you take a minute to fill out this quick survey? Thanks in advance! Okay, on to this week's topic: Imagine you just got hired at as an analyst for a top-tier adventure tourism company (like Summit Adventures, the fake company I created to teach people like you how to solve real-world business problems with SQL) You start your first day on the job by opening your company database and seeing 1,600 rows of customer bookings. Varying prices....
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
Hey Reader -- I'm trying something new this week! Can you take a minute to fill out this quick survey? Thanks in advance! What are you interested in right now? Your answers will help shape the future of what I send each week! 🚀 More SQL Topics More Python Topics More Tableau Topics More Agentic AI Topics Okay, on to this weeks topic: Imagine this: Your boss walks into the Monday morning meeting and says "Show me revenue trends for the last 6 months." Everyone looks at you. Most analysts...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Hey Reader! Here's a mistake I see all the time: An analyst needs to find which expedition difficulty levels generate the most revenue. They write this: SELECT difficulty_level, SUM(revenue) AS total_revenue FROM expeditions WHERE SUM(revenue) > 50000 -- ❌ ERROR GROUP BY difficulty_level; The query fails and confusion sets in. "Why can't I filter by the sum?" It seems like it SHOULD work, but the truth is that many analysts get tripped up on this. The answer: WHERE filters rows. HAVING...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, Imagine this: It's a Thursday afternoon and the CMO at your company just walked up to your desk: "I need a list of our high-value customers who haven't purchased recently. We're launching a win-back campaign Monday morning." You have a few hours to get something usable. Do you know how to find them? Most analysts would panic, fumble through Excel, maybe run a few disconnected queries. But confident analysts? They write one query and deliver the answer in minutes. Here's how. The...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Hey Reader, Over the past few weeks, I’ve shown you The Mister Rogers Blueprint in action using Summit Adventures, the fictional adventure travel company I built for teaching. You’ve seen real queries. Real business insights. Real data quality issues. Today I want to tell you why I built it this way. Because the reason matters more than you might think. The endless tutorial hamster wheel of death You know the pattern. You watch a Udemy course. It makes sense. The instructor shows you SELECT,...
2 months ago • 5 min read
Hey Reader, Last week I showed you The Mister Rogers Blueprint, the step-by-step guide to approaching unfamiliar dataset and delivering actionable insights. You might be thinking: “Okay, cool framework. But does this actually work?” Fair question. Let me show you what happens when people learn SQL this way. First, let’s talk about what doesn’t work. Jenn (a student and data coaching client of mine) paid $2,500 for an SQL course from an Ivy League university. She thought it would be robust,...
3 months ago • 3 min read