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Reading SQL Output for Insight

Explore how to read and understand SQL output by identifying patterns and trends in query results. Learn to translate data into clear explanations for non-technical audiences and develop skills to ask meaningful follow-up questions that deepen your analysis.

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Step 1: Start with a real question

Let’s return to a question you asked earlier: What’s the average salary in each department?

You wrote a query like:

MySQL
SELECT department,
       AVG(salary) AS "Average Salary"
FROM employees
GROUP BY department;

Run it one more time. You might see the following table:

Department

Average Salary

Design

72000

Engineering

98000

Finance

88000

HR

64000

Marketing

75000

Operations

85000

Sales

68000

Support

58000

Pause here. Your job now isn’t to change the SQL; it’s to think about what this means.

Step 2: Observe, then describe

Look closely at the numbers. What do they suggest?

Let’s turn SQL output into plain language.

Engineering has the highest average salary, while Support has the lowest.

That’s the first habit of an analyst: describe what you see before you explain it.

Try asking AI:

Prompt: As an expert data ...