By Marc Ramos, CMO at SplashBI.
As your organisation’s data grows, supportability and migration become much more difficult. Keep using SQL with greater efficiency when it comes to accessing and analysing your data. In a world where data is king, SQL is more relevant than it’s ever been.
WHAT IS SQL?
SQL is a standard database language, translating its functionality into a mature programming language. It’s used to maintain, create, update, modify, and manipulate relational databases. The program is easy to learn and use, integrates easily with scripting languages, and handles massive amounts of information. Data is being generated, collected, and stored at a massive rate every day, therefore it’s important to have the right skill set to be able to fetch useful data for a variety of business purposes. In modern relational databases, SQL is used not only for storing and searching data, but also for deriving conclusions from it so teams can make informed business decisions and increase profits.
Why might businesses need it?
In two words: business intelligence (BI). More and more businesses rely on BI software applications to analyse the data from diverse sources such as SQL databases. BI activities include data mining, online analytical processing (OLAP), statistical analysis, forecasting and reporting. BI helps businesses make sense of the wealth of information that surrounds them, including customer details and trends in sales to guide growth and revenue.
SQL is an integral part of Oracle Cloud Applications. Oracle Cloud applications is used by small, medium and large size organisations and has 9000+ customers. Lets review how the SQL is required in different activities in Oracle Fusion applications
Data Analysis
SQL is commonly used by data engineers, data scientists, and data analysts in software development because it is fairly easy to learn the language and its basic features. It can be used for direct access to an actual database without needing to download data first.
It makes dealing with large amounts of data to find specific subjects or trends easier for data science professionals. Since SQL has become the standard in many workflows and learning, it is a fundamental skill in data analytics departments within business.
Bringing data together
Typically, BI dashboards benefit businesses by tracking processes from beginning to end. Due to this holistic approach, dashboards typically use data from different sources. Dashboards are a good place to bring together all available data sources. This way, organisations can establish relationships between the data they collect and analyse it all as one. Data can be in different part of the applications like Human Capital management (HCM), ERP/ Financials, Supply Chain Management (SCM), Workforce Management, CX, Sales, Customers management etc.
Focusing on KPIs
Dashboards are built to provide quick insights into some of the most important business processes. Dashboards work best if the information they contain is to the point and instantly visible. The dashboard-building process begins with determining its purpose and key performance indicators involved and KPIs are crucial metrics for the evaluation of a business process.
In addition, well-designed dashboards do not have clutter and are concise. Therefore, they provide quick access to KPIs that are tailored to the process that organisations are tracking, helping them to focus on those KPIs even more deeply.
Telling trends
With the requirements set and met, a dashboard gives insight into the well-being of a business. It is a form of quick business news for an organisation.
Dashboards should lay out KPIs in a way that can provide a perspective of the past and current activities so organisations can predict what they will look like in the future and perhaps try to change their course. Having awareness of these trends means organisations can make adjustments to their procedures, and then either further improve their results or prevent issues from escalating and then improve their results.
BI dashboards can benefit businesses when they have the proper setup and design. Due to this, when creating one it is important to understand the purpose and requirements in order to select the right KPIs, to choose the data to present and to design the dashboard in such a way that it tells a story. Once it is built, tested and fully operating, a BI dashboard can be an extension of a BI team with 24/7 availability.
Improving the decision-making process
In a nutshell, BI aims at answering two questions. These questions can be addressed to the business as a whole or to specific segments. What do we do next?” is always followed by a decision. This is precisely the purpose of a dashboard. It is meant to provide answers to numerous questions with a single goal of making an informed decision.
Last words
Business leaders must consider the long term implications of how they collect, store, and manage the data for which they are responsible, and if it appears that they might be heading towards becoming overwhelmed by data based on their current resource usage, they must act sooner rather than later.
The use of SQL especially in Oracle Cloud applications that use it can give companies the much-needed future-proofing for their data storage that will allow them to take advantage of new opportunities.
