We like to categorise the solutions in the market for two types of users - data analysts and developers. Popular options in the market for the former are PowerBI (Microsoft), Tableau, Looker Studio (Google). All these solutions are effective at it’s core and the difference lays in the building the dashboard to display your data.

For the more technical user (developers), options are limitless using Python and various libraries (Matplotlib, Streamlit).

A database is simply a storage mechanism for all data. The reason why this concept is important in technology is that these storages will have rules on how it’s data is stored and how data is retrieved.

An analogy:

• Think of a library (This would be a database)
• The library stores books (Tables)
• In these books you have pages (Rows)
• The library also has a librarian helps you find the book(s) that you may request. (Querying the data)
• During your research you may source many books and cross-reference each other. (Joining Data)