Why should you learn some Standard Query Language (SQL)
Standard Query Language (SQL) will allow you to retrieve and manipulate SAP2 data
easily, and very quickly. MySQL is one of the most standard implementation of SQL and
it is (practically) free. Since MySQL is used heavily in SAP2, it is not a bad idea to know
just enough SQL to be able to manipulate the tables and export data efficiently to other
applications. This is particularly important because the SAP2 tables often contain large
quantity (even millions) of records. There are very few applications that can efficiently
manage large amount of automatically generated data. Therefore, you should look at SQL
as an efficient data pump between the tables and other applications. For example, Matlab
does not have any (respectable) database functionality, and it stores all variables in
memory. It is therefore inefficient to import an entire table to Matlab, but you can use
SQL to pump data epochs into Matlab, calculate something and move to the next epoch.
Furthermore, those data epochs can be very flexible in content. For example, obtaining
epochs containing the pitch of the first 100 syllables produced at around 9AM is a very
simple command:
select pitch from my_table where hour=9 limit 100
as you can see, it is very simple and intuitive to write SQL queries.
SQL is used not only to retrieve but also to process data from your tables, but here we
will only teach you how to select data from a table, how to copy data into a new table,
how to change table values, and how to merge tables together.
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