.. Copyright (C) Google, Runestone Interactive LLC This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. Introduction ============ As mentioned in the preface, SQL (which stands for Structured Query Language) is a programming language that is used to get, store, and change information in a database. SQL is one of the most widely used programming languages today, and can be used in any field where there is data. You may be wondering when you would need to use SQL since you already know how to use Sheets. SQL does many of the things that you have learned in the previous sections, but it also does them on a much larger scale. Imagine a spreadsheet with one billion rows! You can use SQL to analyze anything from stock market prices to patient data at a major hospital. If you have a database with any kind of data, you can use SQL to store and analyze it. In addition, SQL allows you to reorganize data across different datasets. This chapter will teach you how to use SQL to automate data analysis so that you can effectively navigate large datasets that might be cumbersome to navigate by hand.