Filtering, Sorting, Aggregating, and Binning Using SQL

Filtering, sorting, aggregating, and binning are other commonly used operations to transform data before loading it to its final destination for analysis. Let’s discuss how we can use these operations through a use case.

Use case: Analyzing flight delay data

As employees of an airline, we’re tasked with transferring relevant flight data from the company’s cloud data warehouse to a new data mart.

Because of recent flight delays, the company has reserved a data mart for this task. The data mart will assist the analysts in trying to identify the root cause of the recent flight delays. Our task is to transform the huge data set collected by the airline company in the cloud data warehouse and keep only relevant data for the analysts.

For example, we can remove flights that were on time from the data set and therefore irrelevant for this use case.

Here’s the sample flight data from the data warehouse: