The best Tech Skill to have in Finance and Accounting: SQL
Structured Query Language or “SQL” for short is a programming language used to query and manipulate data stored in relational databases. The language is becoming increasingly popular in Finance and Accounting as we find more and more ways to use data.
When I first learned SQL, I found it helpful to first think about how I would use it in my finance job. I knew we had many databases like SAP, Oracle, Snowflake and Access Databases; and I knew that the data that I needed to improve my financial forecasts and analysis existed somewhere inside those databases; I only needed to know how to retrieve that data.
And that’s where SQL came to my rescue. I started by logically reduce the data first in my own mind. I saw this graphic below on LinkedIn about how to translate these steps into a SQL query.
I knew that I wanted to retrieve US sales by year from a database called “database_table” and wanted the data to be ordered by year.
Well, using SQL, it’s as easy as:
SELECT year, sales
FROM database_table
WHERE country = “US”
ORDER BY year ASC
