SQL in the finance field - SQL Video Tutorial | LinkedIn Learning, formerly Lynda.com (2024)

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- SQL can be a very powerful tool in a financial analyst's toolkit. It's great for business intelligence, forecasting, and financial modeling. Let's talk about why SQL is such an effective tool to use in finance. Knowing how to manipulate and analyze financial data and records is at the heart of financial analysis. Financial analysts often deal with large volumes of data to be able to create their financial models. Two common concepts used by financial analysts are pivot tables and V-lookups. These are spreadsheet concepts we will learn more about later, but for now, be aware that they are widely used for building reporting that financial analysts are responsible for. Both pivot tables and V-lookups have direct translations in the world of SQL and can make the analyst's job much easier and faster. Another reason analysts in the field greatly benefit from using SQL in their day-to-day is that they often may need to get their own data rather than depending on engineers to extract it for them. Often, being able to write simple queries in SQL is all they need to access data that may not be readily available to use for their analyses. It's important to acknowledge that some finance professionals won't need to use SQL. Many of the most common analyses, such as financial statement, ratio, and variance analyses just don't require very much or very complex data, and thus can be easily handled by spreadsheets or other reporting systems. However, when the analyst needs to perform deep dive investigations or complex forecasts or they need to work with engineers to acquire the data, SQL is a huge asset, especially to the analysts who want a competitive edge in their field.