Query Overview

General Purpose

Statistica Query is used to easily access data from a wide variety of databases (including many large system databases such as Oracle, MS SQL Server, Sybase, etc.) using Microsoft's OLE DB (Object Linking and Embedding Database) conventions. OLE DB is a powerful database technology that provides universal data integration over an enterprise's network, from mainframe to desktop, regardless of the data type. OLE DB offers a more generalized and more efficient strategy for data access than the older ODBC conventions because it allows access to more types of data and is based on the Component Object Model (COM). An OLE DB provider for Statistica spreadsheets is available.

Statistica Query supports multiple database tables; specific records (rows of tables) can be selected by entering SQL statements, which Statistica Query automatically builds for you as you select the components of the query via a simple graphical interface and/or intuitive menu options and dialogs. Therefore, an extensive knowledge of SQL is not necessary in order for you to create advanced and powerful queries of data in a quick and straightforward manner. Multiple queries based on one or many different databases can also be created to return data to an individual spreadsheet, and you can maintain connections to multiple external databases simultaneously.

Writing information back to an external database
With Statistica, you can also write certain information computed by the program back to the original input data file or database and, thus, integrate computed statistics into an existing database or data warehouse. Specifically, with the Rapid Deployment of Models module, you can write computed statistics (predictions, predicted classifications, classification probabilities, residuals) back into the current input data file; this capability to, for example, merge classification probabilities computed by various models into an existing database or data warehouse is extremely useful in the context of data mining applications to deploy models for extremely large data sets. See the Query Options dialog box for additional details regarding the specific settings of options to enable Statistica to write results to fields in an external database.

See Quick, Step-by-Step Instructions for further details.