Top 3 Differences Between Audit Command Language and SQL for Data Analysis

Data analytics, as a professional skill, has been in such high demand over the last 8-9 years as a result of the abilities of companies around the world to capture customer data related to how they buy or how they run the business. your own finances. Evolution in software development has enabled this capability. However, there is this ongoing debate as to whether the same software tools used to create the data capture capabilities can be used for data analysis or if we need more dedicated software tools to accomplish the same thing.

One such tool is SQL-based database software, which essentially forms the backend for any operation. It is used to perform queries to obtain information from data sources. Audit Command Language is another tool, which is dedicated to data analysis projects only. Let’s see the main differences between these tools, to decide which approach is better.

1. easy interface – The first advantage of ACL over SQL-based tools is the user interface. For any end user trying to work on an analytics project, you can complete basic routine tasks to get very detailed reports just by using the GUI. Check out the ACL GUI demo below:

2. Work spaces – A defining feature of the ACL tool is “workspaces”. Workspaces allow the end user to write simple lines of code for data manipulation and test the results without having to run any scripts. Workspaces allow flexibility and another layer to the ACL project design process to execute the desired tasks.

3. scripts – Scripting in ACL Audit Command Language is a combination of scripts and workspaces. most data manipulation tasks, such as creating new formatted fields from the raw data, are done primarily in workspaces, where the scripting syntax is fairly simple. Apart from the workspaces, most of the tasks (such as summarizing, filtering, sorting, etc.) on the data can be performed simply by using the GUI provided by the tool. If any user is inclined to learn scripting (regarding parsing tasks like summarizing, classifying, aggregating, joining, etc.), the logs provide the scripts related to all tasks performed with the GUI.

The ACL audit command language can be considered an entry level skill that can be used for almost any type of analysis project, especially in the audit/risk analysis domains. It acts as a refined layer of software on top of the data captured in ERP systems. It’s easier to get up to speed for professionals who don’t have a technical background and it almost takes like a day maybe, if you have an educational technical background. For these reasons, it is easier to train a workforce on this tool, due to the easy learning curve and relatively affordable investment compared to SQL, SAS, HADOOP/HIVE infrastructure.