Below is my official bio, but more importantly my social links to connect directly with me. I want to hear about your experience, background and how we can make this course the best it can be to help you along your journey. Don’t hesitate to reach at any point.
Formal Bio
Ryan brings over 20 years of experience as a Salesforce customer. Throughout these two decades, Ryan has donned various hats in analytics, working as a hands-on practitioner, consultant, entrepreneur, author, and community leader. After 15 years in enterprise software, Ryan shifted gears from being a vendor to a customer. As the VP of Data Analytics for a mid-sized financial services company, he implemented and executed his analytics strategy playbook over a span of 4 years. With thousands of hours dedicated to building a successful analytics competency center using Salesforce, Snowflake and Azure, Ryan has channeled his expertise, tools, and recent AI advancements into his latest endeavor, DataTools Pro.
This course will focus on Data Query Language, DQL for short. The aim of introducing SQL is to focus on query and analysis use cases for selecting data from your database. This is a great starting point and gives you coverage and common ground when collaborating with analytics and data teams.
We will leverage Snowflake to import data, but will not get into SQL commands for creating and administering a database. A general understanding of Data Query Language will open the door for you to explore other areas like Data Definition, Data Manipulation, and administrative functions like Data Control, and Transaction Control. I will explain various commands at a high level to give you a good foundation.
The SQL concepts and code you will learn in this course are universal. It will translate to most Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) databases including, but not limited to, Microsoft SQL server, MySQL, POSTRESQL, and others. I will also reference Salesforce SOQL from time to time. We are going to use Snowflake as the cloud database of choice due to:
Synergies with Salesforce and native integration.
Minimal friction to start building.
It being a single, web-based experience to learn from.
Salesforce has been investing heavily in Data Cloud, meaning more customer-related data will flow in and out of Salesforce. Having a background and understanding of how those processes work with an SQL foundation will help you understand the needs and requirements of your data team.
Salesforce’s “Bring your own Datalake” BYOL will allow external data sources like Snowflake and Databricks to natively enhance Salesforce as a platform. Upskilling and understanding SQL will ensure you can make yourself available to support these initiatives.
Knowing SQL will allow you to deliver direct support to Marketing Cloud engineers working to extract and format the right data into marketing journeys.
SQL is a gateway into the wide-open world of data and analytics outside of Salesforce. Snowflake in particular and Databricks are the two leading data platforms for analytics.
Employees with SQL skills earn an average of 10% more than those without, according to PayScale.com.
The job market for SQL skills is projected to grow 10% between 2020 and 2030, much faster than the average for all occupations. (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics)
72% of hiring managers in the United States consider SQL skills to be “very important” or “essential” when hiring for data-related roles. (Source: Indeed 2023 Hiring Report)
Perspective
I have taken an “analytics first” approach to this course where we will learn SQL based on common real-world use cases where we need data out of Salesforce to facilitate reporting and analytics. We are taking this step together and making connections to the power of Salesforce reporting functions. To draw comparisons and differences between Salesforce native features and SQL, I hope to explain how and why various SQL functions exist in the context of a data or analytics professional using Salesforce data outside of Salesforce.
To successfully complete this course you will need access to a Snowflake trial and preferably a Salesforce org with an administrator role to follow along. We will not perform any changes, data insertion, or extraction from Salesforce. Instead, I will provide sample data pre-extracted from a Salesforce trial org that we will load into Snowflake together.
Let’s start with the Snowflake signup process. Snowflake provides a 30-day free trial with plenty of credits.
Important Note: From time to time, Snowflake will make small tweaks to their Sign Up process. We have documented the process as of January 2024.
Fill in your contact information, role, and geography, then click “Continue”.
Select “Standard” edition – You can always upgrade to enterprise later if you need enterprise features. For this training, you will not need any enterprise features.
Select AWS and choose the geography closest to you – It’s important to note that you need no working knowledge of any of the cloud providers and will not need to access or perform any further actions. The cloud provider selection indicates to Snowflake what data center your sample data and queries will run in Snowflake. We will cover this in more detail in an upcoming lesson.
Fill in the Snowflake questionnaire – Snowflake will ask you a few qualifying questions to understand your use case. The answers have no impact on how Snowflake performs.
Open your email and look for an email from Snowflake Computing (no-reply@snowflake.net).
Click on the button or link to activate.
Set a username – A username can contain only letters and numbers, so you cannot use an email address.
Set a password – Keep the username and password in a safe place. There is no email to reset a password for administrators like Salesforce. I typically use a client password manager like 1Password or LastPass.
Success! Now we should be logged into Snowflake. We will do some basic admin housekeeping steps in an upcoming lab when we import our lab data.
Capture your Login URL
While logged in, go to the lower left corner of the screen and click on the Snowflake icon. You will see the instance of your Snowflake and where it is located. If you hover and click on the “Link” icon, you will copy the URL to your Snowflake instance. Keep this URL handy, as it will be required to access your Snowflake instance to log in. In the event you use Snowflake, your account ID and Organization IDs are also listed.
Salesforce Developer Account (optional)
In this course, I will reference Salesforce admin or reporting screens regularly as an illustrative step to explain SQL concepts and functions. I do not have topics or labs that will require you to extract or input data into your Salesforce org, but I do access features that require admin access.
As such, I list this as an optional step if you do not have a Salesforce org, don’t have admin rights, or simply want to keep all of your learning activities independent of your work Salesforce org. You can follow these steps to get a free developer account:
Find the section dedicated to Salesforce Developer Edition and locate the “Sign Up for the Salesforce Developer Edition” button.
Fill out the provided form with the necessary information, and then click the “Sign Me Up” button. Salesforce will send an email to the specified address, containing instructions on how to access your new Developer Org. Make sure that you provide a valid email address because Salesforce will send login instructions to that email.
Choose a unique username for accessing your Developer Org – It should follow the format of your email address and be easy to remember. For example, you could use something like “youremail@gmail.com.sfbensql”.
You will receive an email from developer@salesforce.com with the subject “Welcome to Salesforce: Verify Your Account”.
Click on the “Verify Account” button – This action will open a new browser page where you can reset your password.
Input a new password on the password reset page that adheres to the specified password requirements in the “new password” field. Repeat the same password in the “confirm new password” field. Select a security question and provide an answer. Then, click the “change password” button.
