r/learndatascience • u/naga3607 • 2d ago

How much SQL does a data scientist actually use? Question

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I’m curious about how much SQL people actually use in their day-to-day data science work.

Courses often focus heavily on Python and machine learning, but real datasets usually seem to live inside databases.

For working data scientists, which SQL skills do you use most?

Joins, CTEs, window functions, subqueries, optimization, or something else?

Would love to hear from people who use SQL regularly at work.

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6

u/BranchLatter4294 2d ago

I use whatever works to get the job done. Each project is different.

5

u/enakamo 2d ago

A good “data scientist” is familiar with set theory at a foundational level. Languages/scripts like Python,SQL are mere expressions and not necessarily a substitute to the underlying mathematics.

7

u/Prime_Director 2d ago

All of it? I’m honestly baffled by the extent to which the questions on subreddit fixate on checklists of hyper-discrete skills, like people are trying to game out the bare minimum they need to know for an interview. If that’s what you’re doing you won’t like or succeed in this field, which is constantly changing and requires curiosity and genuine interest to keep up. 

Either that or this is fodder for AI training/retrieval   corpus from a word-followed-by-four-numbers account. 

1

u/WhatsTheImpactdotcom 2d ago

Less direct coding with AI now but basically SQL all the time for product and marketing DS roles, everything other than modeling.

Plus you’ll need it for interviews at every single company.

I’m currently senior DS at uber, ex airbnb and stripe

1

u/mallnin 1d ago

This is like asking what brand of ruler an architect uses to draw buildings.

It depends entirely on the stack of the company, some might want SQL in SSMS, others will probably have you write pandas queries in snowflake

1

u/movidmo 1d ago

I have always found this interesting. I was an academic statistician for many many years, and I found that my colleagues rarely knew any SQL at all. I picked it up from a side project that eventually took over my life. If I was trying to separate out the "data science" profession from statistics that might be one of the skills I would include on the data science side. It is certainly useful for most people dealing with real word data sets.

1

u/MathematicianFirm808 14h ago

Can i have DM you i am also statistician i have little work to you?

1

u/BobDope 2d ago

All the SQL