I was preparing for a phone interview this morning when I realized something: SQL was my first programming language, and, if I’m being honest, I fell in love with it immediately.

I think that had to something to do with how easy it was to grasp, and I had never dipped my toes into the wide waters of programming, so it was intimidating. And where there was overwhelm, SQL showed me how it could be simple.

I still haven’t gotten a chance to use my SQL knowledge in a work setting, but the closest I’ve gotten so far is using it for a project. I was having trouble with finding out certain metrics and pieces of information from the baseball datasets I was using and said, “Ah! SQL will help.”

I’ve done a few different courses where I do SQL in their own terminals, or the one where I downloaded MS SQL Server 2014, that I’m still learning, but I found out about another option last month: SQLite.

SQLite is meant to be a serverless way to do SQL queries on a database. There’s a couple of ways to access it, by importing it with Python, through the CMD terminal, and with SQLite Studio.

I hate to admit that I’m still learning to use it for the datasets that I want. I want to use it through SQLite Studio, but I may have to query it through the CMD terminal, because then I can call CSVs. That’s the biggest downside to SQLite Studio, is that from what I can tell, it will only take a very specific file type.

The person who told me about SQLite in the first place, a teammate from the residency program, said they import it in Python and use it there. Since I’ve had issues with SQLite and the CMD terminal before… unfortunately… I’m going to try it using Python.

Whatever it takes to get it working. I miss working with SQL, but despite how easy it is to use, it feels like I’ve got a lot of obstacles to using it for projects.

I know that won’t be the case when I get into it for work: normally data teams or companies that employ SQL in their analysis will have established servers and software that will be set up for whatever machine you end up using.

It’s always felt out of my reach for that reason. SQLite excited me because it felt like I could finally use my first and favorite language for the projects I have, bridging any gaps and giving me the answers I need where I can’t find them with other languages.

Have you felt the same, between learning SQL and deploying it for use with personal projects? Have you had any hurdles or obstacles to using it? How do you use it primarily?

I’m forging ahead with using it in Python for the moment, and from there I hope to get more used to setting it up. I’ll be happy to be reunited with SQL in that practical way. When I’m successful, you’ll see the results in my finished baseball project!

Thank you for sticking around and listening to me gush about my first programming love, SQL. Next week may be a post about PowerBI since I’ve finally installed it for the trial. I’m going to come up with a separate project to poke around on it and share my findings then.

As always, I hope your data cleaning is swift and easy!