SQL for Natural History Collection Data

Databases are useful for both storing and using data effectively. Using a relational database serves several purposes.

• It keeps your data separate from your analysis. This means there’s no risk of accidentally changing data when you analyze it.
• If we get new data we can rerun a query to find all the data that meets certain criteria.
• It’s fast, even for large amounts of data.
• It improves quality control of data entry (type constraints and use of forms in Access, Filemaker, etc.)
• The concepts of relational database querying are core to understanding how to do similar things using programming languages such as R or Python.

This lesson will teach you what relational databases are, how you can load data into them and how you can query databases to extract just the information that you need.

Getting Started

Data Carpentry’s teaching is hands-on, so participants are encouraged to use their own computers to insure the proper setup of tools for an efficient workflow.
These lessons assume no prior knowledge of the skills or tools.

To get started, follow the directions in the “Setup” tab to download data to your computer and follow any installation instructions.

Prerequisites

This lesson requires a working copy of SQLite Manager for SQL.
To most effectively use these materials, please make sure to install everything before working through this lesson.

For Instructors

If you are teaching this lesson in a workshop, please see the Instructor notes.