SQL for accounting and finance professionals

If you’re an accounting or finance professional wanting to learn SQL, I’ve got good news: most of the knowledge you have of Excel or Google Sheets can be translated into SQL. Whether you’re looking at a spreadsheet or a database table, the core fundamentals are the same: it’s all about manipulating a big grid of data. This guide will show you how to query databases through comparisons to the tools you already know: spreadsheets.

Secure your Raspberry Pi by enabling automatic software updates

One of the biggest steps you can take to ensure your security online is to keep the software on your devices up to date and install any software updates that come out. This advice doesn’t just apply to your computers and phones, but also internet of things devices like a Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone Black. Luckily this is an easy process with the help of one important software package.

Calculating medians and quartiles across groups in SQL

One of the best ways to understand data is through the use of descriptive statistics, figuring out the minimum and maximum values, the median value, and the quartiles.  When you’re working with smaller datasets this is easy, but with larger datasets you need to parse a lot of data to get these metrics.  Luckily, you can use SQL to get descriptive statistics for your data directly from the database.

ETL in MySQL – How to automatically load data into a table every day

I’m working on a dashboard to track COVID-19 cases per capita in Calgary, and while the government’s open data API provides daily case counts within the city it doesn’t have any history available. The easy solution to this is to download the data on a daily basis and archive it myself, but I want to automate the download and loading into the database so I don’t have to think about it. Luckily, MySQL and a bit of shell script goes a long way.

Installing MySQL 8 on Ubuntu 20.04

If you need a database for a project, MySQL is one of the most popular choices. It’s free, open-source and is a core part of of the popular LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) web application stack. If you want to get started using MySQL for a project, here’s a guide of how to install it on a fresh installation of Ubuntu 20.04.

Secure your Raspberry Pi with a firewall

After you’ve changed the default username and password on our Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone Black, the next step to securing it is to install and configure a firewall. A firewall will help keep your device secure by limiting or block connections to the services running on your device, creating a far smaller attack surface that can be exploited.

Create Professional Reports in Excel using R and XLSX

While R is the real workhorse of data analysis and modeling, if you want to share the results of your work with other people your probably going to send it in a spreadsheet. Luckily the xlsx package for R makes it easy to export simple spreadsheets and also has advanced functionality to create workbooks with professional design and formatting.