Useful business analysis requires you to effectively transform data into actionable information. This book helps you use SQL and Excel to extract business information from relational databases and use that data to define business dimensions, store transactions about customers, produce results, and more. Each chapter explains when and why to perform a particular type of business analysis in order to obtain useful results, how to design and perform the analysis using SQL and Excel, and what the results should look like

Includes index

A Data Miner Looks at SQL -- What's in a Table? Getting Started with Data Exploration -- How Different Is Different? -- Where Is It All Happening? Location, Location, Location -- It's a Matter of Time -- How Long Will Customers Last? Survival Analysis to Understand Customers and Their Value -- Factors Affecting Survival: The What and Why of Customer Tenure -- Customer Purchases and Other Repeated Events -- What's in a Shopping Cart? Market Basket Analysis -- Association Rules and Beyond -- Data Mining Models in SQL -- The Best-Fit Line: Linear Regression Models -- Building Customer Signatures for Further Analysis -- Performance Is the Issue: Using SQL Effectively -- Equivalent Constructs Among Databases