Your First Mission

Your first week as a Business Analyst

You just joined the analytics team at a retail company. On day two, the Head of Sales stops by your desk:

"We're putting next quarter's budget behind one sales channel. Which one is actually pulling the weight? Get me the numbers."

She walks off. The answer is sitting in the company database. The tool that gets it out is SQL, and by the end of this 20-minute intro you will have pulled it yourself, in your browser, with zero setup.

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Your mission: find which sales channel brings in the most revenue. You will build the answer one small step at a time, and run real queries along the way.

A database is just tables

Every company runs on data stored in a database. A database is a set of tables, and a table is just a spreadsheet with a strict shape: columns are the fields, rows are the records.

Here is the table you will use, called orders. Each row is a single order placed by a customer:

id	customer	segment	country	channel	amount	status
1	Acme Corp	enterprise	USA	web	4200	completed
2	TechStart	smb	France	mobile	890	completed
5	CloudFirst	mid-market	USA	store	1980	cancelled

See the channel column (web, mobile, store, phone) and the amount? Those two hold the answer to your mission. You just have to ask the database the right question.

Why this is the BA superpower

SQL gives you independence. Instead of waiting three days for the data team to pull numbers, you answer the Head of Sales yourself in 30 seconds. That is what the rest of this intro builds toward.

Next: let's open the data and look inside.