Data Sources for Analytics

In this chapter, we will review various sources of data that we can import and process in SQL Server for any analytical and data science techniques. This data can come from other database systems, flat files, application-specific files such as Excel, and web sources, among others. In regards to data structure, we can consider the data to be imported as structured, semi-structured, or unstructured. Based on the source and type of data, we have different tools in place that we can use to store the data in an SQL Server database.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

• Getting data from databases
• Importing flat files
• Working with XML data
• Working with JSON
• External data with PolyBase