ETL: Combining and Summarizing Data

Description

This class introduces techniques for organizing data and combining information from multiple tables or files. These techniques are important because information about a single business activity is often distributed across multiple accounting records and data sources.

Motivation

How do we bring information from different sources together?

Review

The prior class introduced ETL as a general process for preparing data. This class focuses on how relationships between datasets can be used to bring related information together for analysis.

Class plan

• We will breifly review prior ETL material from prior classes.
• We will focus on ETL processes for relational databases, a common source of transaction and other financial data.
• We will undertake activities to join relational databases using primary keys.
• We will undertake activities to summarize joined data and discuss the actionable insight form the transformation.

Concepts

• relational databases
• primary keys
• joins
• summaries

Data

Git extracted data in ACCTG320/Joins (git pull maybe required).