Showing posts with label lots. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lots. Show all posts

Monday, March 19, 2012

Dummy Question

It seems every month when I'm diluged by lots of data I fall back on ole
reliable, Excel. But, I get over 50,000 rows of data to scrub. A colleague
of mine suggested I use a database. Seems simple so far, but having dabbled
in Access, it has always not so intuitive to understand. My question is
two-fold, is SQL a database. I believe its the language of some other
database. If I'm corrent on the later, what database(s) use SQL?

TonyTony,

There's a lot of ground to cover with that one simple question :) SQL
is an abbreviation for Structured Query Language, and it's a language
that is used primarily to retrieve and manipulate data that is stored
in a database system.

There are as many dialects of SQL as there are databases; Access uses
Jet-SQL, SQL Server and Sybase both use Transact-SQL, Oracle has
PL/SQL, and so on. Most databases adhere to a form of generic SQL know
as ANSI-SQL, but there adherance varies.

You may want to start here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL

HTH,
Stu

ajocius wrote:
> It seems every month when I'm diluged by lots of data I fall back on ole
> reliable, Excel. But, I get over 50,000 rows of data to scrub. A colleague
> of mine suggested I use a database. Seems simple so far, but having dabbled
> in Access, it has always not so intuitive to understand. My question is
> two-fold, is SQL a database. I believe its the language of some other
> database. If I'm corrent on the later, what database(s) use SQL?
> Tony