Data Analysis Using SQL and Excel

Acknowledgments

Although this book has only one name on the cover, there are many people over a long period of time who have helped me both specifically on this book and more generally in understanding data, analysis, and presentation.

Michael Berry, my business partner and colleague since 1998 at Data Miners, has been tremendously helpful on all fronts. He reviewed the chapters, tested the SQL code in the examples, and helped anonymize the data. His insights have been helpful and his debugging skills have made the examples much more accurate. His wife, Stephanie Jack, also deserves special praise for her patience and willingness to share Michael's time.

Bob Elliott, my editor at Wiley, and the Wiley team not only accepted my original idea for this book, but have exhibited patience and understanding as I refined the ideas and layout.

Matt Keiser, President of Datran Marketing, and Howard Lehrman (formerly of Datran) were kind enough to provide computing power for testing many of the examples. Nick Drake, also of Datran, inspired the book, by asking for a SQL reference focused on data analysis.

Throughout the chapters, the understanding of data processing is based on dataflows, which Craig Stanfill of Ab Initio Corporation first introduced me to, once upon a time when we worked together at Thinking Machines Corporation.

Stuart Ward and Zaiying Huang (from the New York Times) have spent countless hours over the past several years explaining statistical concepts to me. Harrison Sohmer, ...