Dejan Sarka - Advanced Analytics with Transact-SQL

This one-day seminar is intended for professionals working with SQL Server or Azure SQL Database who want to perform advanced analytics without learning a new programming language such as Python or R. Participants will learn how to use Transact-SQL for data preparation, as well as for statistical and data science analyses.

Course will take place on June 12, 2026 at Hotel International Zagreb, Miramarska cesta 24, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia.

Session abstract

Summary

T-SQL language in latest editions of SQL Server and Azure SQL Database, has so many business intelligence (BI) improvements that it might become your primary analytic database system. Many database developers and administrators are already proficient with T-SQL. Occasionally they need to analyze the data with statistical or data science methods, but they do not want to or have time to learn a completely new language for these tasks. In addition, they need to analyze huge amounts of data, where specialized languages like R and Python might not be fast enough. SQL Server has been optimized for work with big datasets for decades.

If you want to learn how to get information from your data with Transact-SQL, or shortly T-SQL language, then this course is the course for you. It will teach you how to calculate statistical measures from descriptive statistics including centers, spreads, skewness and kurtosis of a distribution, find the associations between pairs of variables, including calculating the linear regression formula, calculate the confidence level with definite integration, find the amount of information in your variables, and do also some machine learning or data science analysis, including predictive modeling.

In order to get the maximum out of these language constructs, you need to learn how to properly use them. This in-depth course shows extremely efficient statistical queries that use the window functions and are optimized through algorithms that use mathematical knowledge and creativity. The formulas and usage of those statistical procedures are explained as well.

Any serious analysis starts with data preparation. The course introduces some common data preparation tasks and shows how to implement them in T-SQL. Attendees also learn one of the most complex tasks in the data preparation, the fuzzy matching, which has become doable in T-SQL with help of some new functions introduced in version 2025.

No analysis is good without good data quality. The course introduces data quality issues, and shows how you can check for completeness and accuracy with T-SQL. And since the talk is already about the time, the course shows how you can optimize queries with temporal data, for example when you search for overlapping intervals. More advanced time-oriented information includes hazard and survival analysis.

Then the course switches to the currently most fashionable topic, the data science. Some of quite advanced algorithms can also be implemented in T-SQL. The attendees learn about the market basket analysis with association rules using different measures like support, confidence, and lift. Then the course shows how to develop predictive models with a mixture of k-nearest neighbor and decision trees algorithms and with Bayesian inference analysis.

Modules

• Descriptive Statistics
• Associations between Pairs of Variables
• Data Preparation and Data Quality
• Fuzzy Matching
• Time-Oriented Data and Time-Oriented Analyses
• Data Science in T-SQL

Dejan Sarka

MVP Alumni, MCT

Dejan Sarka, MCT and SQL Server MVP Alumni, is an independent trainer and consultant that focuses on development of database and business intelligence applications.

Besides projects, he spends about half of the time on training and mentoring.

He is the founder of the Slovenian SQL Server and .NET Users Group.

Dejan Sarka is the main author or co-author of twenty books about databases and SQL Server.

Dejan Sarka has also developed many courses and seminars for Radacad, Microsoft, SolidQ, and Pluralsight.

Pricing

Register

Registrations for the seminar are opened until 05.06.2026. Because of limited seats and great interest please register on time if you like to attend this event.

If you are interested in attending the Data Saturday Croatia 2026 preconference seminar “Dejan Sarka - Advanced Analytics with Transact-SQL” please reserve your seat and register here.
*Registration is just a seat reservation; you will get payment details for the event when minimum number of attendees is meet.