As more and more industries are getting digitized and more humans are coming online due to deeper penetration of cellular networks, more data is generated.

Data is stored in a database and computers show that data on screen, which can be seen by human eye. This data can be in any form. It can be a text, like a tweet. It can be data related to sales made by a store. It can also be a metadata, meaning, data about data, like the number of tweets made in a day.

Data can be interpreted by humans, through numbers, or visualizations for various business needs.

Data needs to be interpreted by humans for understanding the projections of the business.

It would be impossible to scale a business. Or, make changes in the business, if the people related to business do not understand the exact overall picture of the business.

There were various businesses during COVID pandemic which were shut because they could not understand the needs of their customers. There was rise in selling of smartphones and laptops during COVID pandemic because of the lockdowns and increasing reliance of people on online services.

The business which were able to properly able to manage their inventory with various electronic gadgets were able to remain in business.

A data analyst is a person who can use his skills to extract business sense from data.

Since data stays in the database, hence there is need of a query tool to be able to query that database. SQL is the best suited tool for that.

The database is queried by a data analyst and the required data is analysed.

To make the business sense of that data that needs to be presented on some visualization tool like PowerBI or Tableau.

Business decisions are made on the basis of the conclusions shown by the tools like PowerBI or Tableau.

Conclusion:

1. Data Analyst is a professional who make use of his skills related to quering a data and then visualising that data for the business needs.

2. The skills needed to become a data analyst are command over a query language like SQL and a visualisation tool like PowerBI or Tableau.