Skip to content

SQL Case Studies

Documenting SQL case studies from Danny Ma's 8 Week SQL Challenge for learning and practice purposes.

Option 1: Docker, PostgreSQL and SQLPad

Install docker and docker compose:

docker compose up

SQLPad can accessed at http://localhost:3000 or the port specified in the compose.yml file.

Stop and remove the containers with:

docker compose down

Option 2: Python, Amazon Athena, and Jupyter Notebook

Virtual Environment

The project manager used in this project is uv:

uv sync --frozen --all-groups

Amazon Athena

The Athena class can be used to interact with Amazon Athena. To use this client, the AWS principal (e.g., an IAM role or IAM user) used must have the necessary permissions for Athena.

Customized S3 permissions are needed if a non-default bucket is to be used to store the query results (see below for more details).

The required permissions can be encapsulated in a boto3 session instance and passed as the first argument to the constructor of the Athena client. The create_session utility function can be used to create the session instance. The parameters are:

  • profile_name: The AWS credentials profile name to use.

  • role_arn: The IAM role ARN to assume. If provided, the profile_name must have the sts:AssumeRole permission.

  • duration_seconds: The duration, in seconds, for which the temporary credentials are valid. If role-chaining occurs, the maximum duration is 1 hour.

import boto3
from src.utils import create_session

boto3_session = create_session(
    profile_name="aws-profile-name",
    role_arn=os.getenv("ATHENA_IAM_ROLE_ARN"), 
)

S3 Bucket

The data parquet files for the case studies must be stored in an S3 bucket. All DDL queries are stored in the sql directory under each case study directory. These must be adjusted to point to the correct S3 uris. The data files can be uploaded to an S3 bucket using the aws cli or the console.

# Create a bucket
$ aws s3api create-bucket --bucket sql-case-studies --profile profile-name
# Upload all data files to the bucket
$ aws s3 cp data/ s3://sql-case-studies/ --recursive --profile profile-name

Optionally, query results can be configured to be stored in a custom S3 bucket, instead of the default bucket (i.e., aws-athena-query-results-accountid-region).

The query result S3 uri can be stored as an environment variable, e.g. ATHENA_S3_OUTPUT=s3://bucket-name/path/to/output/, which can then be passed as the s3_output argument to the Athena class constructor. The client creates the default bucket if the s3_output argument is not provided.

import os 
from src.athena import Athena
from src.utils import create_session

boto3_session = create_session(
    profile_name="aws-profile-name",
    role_arn=os.getenv("ATHENA_IAM_ROLE_ARN"), 
)
s3_output = os.getenv('ATHENA_S3_OUTPUT', '')

athena = Athena(boto3_session=boto3_session, s3_output=s3_output)

Jupyter Notebook

Each case study folder contains a notebooks directory containing Jupyter notebooks that can be used to run SQL queries.