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.
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.