Big Data & Business Analytics

Learn analytics by doing it.

30 courses take you from your first SELECT to SQL, Python and pandas, data warehouses, pipelines and the tools behind big data. Every lesson comes with a lab that runs real SQL and real Python in your browser, on the same running example company, so you see the query, the output and whether your answer is right. Nothing to install.

The first course is free in full — lessons, labs, final exam and the certificate. No card, no trial clock.

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Real SQL and Python, in the page

Not a quiz about queries — SQL and Python themselves, running in your browser. Write SELECT statements or pandas code, read the output, get told if your answer is right. 240 labs so far.

🎓
Concepts, not just syntax

Why a join fans out, when a laptop is enough and when it is not, what a metric actually measures. The idea is explained, then done — with the exact query or code and its exact output.

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A certificate per course

Pass the final exam and get a certificate with a public verification link and a PDF — one for every course you finish.

The honest part

One running example, all the way through.

Every course works on the same fictional company, Alpenkorb AG, an online grocer in Zurich, so a join or a pipeline you learn in one lesson is a table you already know in the next. SQL where SQL is the right tool, Python and pandas where they genuinely help, and a clear note whenever a topic (a Spark cluster, a cloud warehouse) is explained rather than run, because the browser lab cannot spin one up. Available in twelve languages, on the web and on iPhone and iPad.

Curriculum

30 courses, in order

30 courses · 240 lessons · one certificate each

🧭 Data-Driven Decisions: From Question to Answer
Follow Alpenkorb's new head of growth from a vague question to a one-page budget memo, with real SQL on real-sized data in every lesson.
Free, in full
📐 Data Literacy & KPI Design
Read numbers critically and define KPIs that two analysts compute the same way, with Alpenkorb's first dashboard as the case.
8 lessons · Beginner
🧱 Data Types, Tables & Data Models
Keys, types, facts, dimensions and grain: the structure behind every correct number, checked with SQL on Alpenkorb's tables.
8 lessons · Beginner
🗄️ SQL Basics: SELECT, WHERE, ORDER BY
Choose columns, filter rows, handle NULL, sort, calculate and work with dates, on the real Alpenkorb product and order tables.
8 lessons · Beginner
📊 Aggregation & GROUP BY
Turn Alpenkorb's orders into report-ready totals, averages, shares and rates, and learn the mistakes that make totals quietly wrong.
8 lessons · Beginner
🔗 JOINs: Combining Tables
Put Alpenkorb's customers, orders, lines, products and campaigns together without losing rows or counting them twice.
8 lessons · Intermediate
🧩 Subqueries & CTEs
Break Alpenkorb's harder questions into named steps: subqueries, EXISTS, derived tables, CTE pipelines, recursive calendars and a debugging routine.
8 lessons · Intermediate
🪟 Window Functions
Rankings, running totals, moving averages and period-over-period changes on Alpenkorb's orders, without losing a single row.
8 lessons · Intermediate
🧰 Advanced SQL for Analytics
Date spines, pivots, text cleaning, JSON, subtotals, sampling, percentiles and query plans, on Alpenkorb's real-sized data.
8 lessons · Intermediate
🐍 Python Essentials for Analysts
Values, loops, functions, dates and files: the plain Python an analyst needs before pandas, practised on Alpenkorb's real order data.
8 lessons · Beginner
🐼 pandas: DataFrames
Load, filter, derive, sort and summarise Alpenkorb's orders with pandas, and learn the traps that make wrong numbers look right.
8 lessons · Beginner
🧹 Data Cleaning & Preparation
Turn Alpenkorb's messy CRM export back into 1,554 customers with pandas, one checked and repeatable step at a time.
8 lessons · Intermediate
🔍 Exploratory Data Analysis
Group, bin, correlate, resample and follow cohorts in pandas, then turn what you found into questions worth answering.
8 lessons · Intermediate
🐘 What Makes Data "Big"
Measure volume, storage and cost on a million rows in your browser, and choose the simplest tool that really works.
8 lessons · Intermediate
⚡ Distributed Processing: Spark Concepts
Learn how Spark splits, shuffles and plans work, and rehearse every idea with runnable Python and DuckDB labs.
8 lessons · Intermediate
🏛️ Data Warehouses & Lakehouses
Model Alpenkorb for analysis, build bronze, silver and gold layers in SQL, and reason about partitions and cloud costs.
8 lessons · Intermediate
🔄 ETL/ELT & Data Pipelines
Move Alpenkorb's data safely: idempotent loads, change data capture, contracts, backfills and a DAG run order in Python.
8 lessons · Intermediate
🛠️ Analytics Engineering with dbt
Models, refs, tests, incremental loads and snapshots, practised as the SQL dbt compiles, on Alpenkorb's data.
8 lessons · Advanced
⚡ Streaming & Real-Time Analytics
Event time, Kafka partitions, windows, watermarks and exactly-once, simulated on an Alpenkorb clickstream in SQL and pandas.
8 lessons · Advanced
🛡️ Data Quality & Governance
Measure quality with SQL, catch broken metrics, know who owns what, and handle personal data with care.
8 lessons · Advanced
👥 Customer Analytics: Cohorts, Retention & CLV
Follow customers from their first order, measure retention and churn honestly, and put a value on each segment.
8 lessons · Advanced
📣 Marketing & Product Analytics
Funnels, sessions, attribution, ROAS, adoption and retention on Alpenkorb data, and the biases that make them lie.
8 lessons · Advanced
🧪 A/B Testing & Experimentation
Design, size, analyse and report experiments by hand, from the hypothesis to a readout that survives a sceptical reader.
8 lessons · Advanced
📈 Forecasting & Time Series
Trend, seasonality and noise, honest baselines, MAE and MAPE on a hold-out, regression features, intervals and a demand plan.
8 lessons · Advanced
🤖 Predictive Analytics & Machine Learning Basics
Define a target without leakage, fit linear and logistic regression in NumPy, grow a Gini stump, and judge models against simple rules.
8 lessons · Advanced
📊 Dashboards & Data Storytelling
Build the exact tables behind KPI cards, trends and breakdowns, catch misleading visuals by arithmetic, and turn a quarter into a board-ready page.
8 lessons · Advanced
🚚 Operations & Supply Chain Analytics
Measure stock, delivery, capacity and cost-to-serve with SQL and pandas, and know which assumptions each formula makes.
8 lessons · Advanced
💹 Finance & Pricing Analytics
Build the P&L from order data, find where margin is made and lost, and test prices, discounts, budgets and scenarios.
8 lessons · Advanced
🤖 AI & LLMs in Analytics
Use AI tools for data work without trusting them blindly: verify generated SQL, evaluate classifiers, protect personal data and know the rules.
8 lessons · Advanced
🎓 Capstone: A Full Analytics Project
Take Alpenkorb's Q2 2026 budget question from scoping and data audit to a model, cohorts, a test plan, a forecast and a decision log.
8 lessons · Advanced

Start with the free course.

If it teaches you something you can use tomorrow, the rest are waiting.

Open Data-Driven Decisions: From Question to Answer
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