Glossary
Data analyst
A practitioner who explores and reports on data, typically with SQL and BI tools, to answer specific business questions.
A data analyst works with data that has usually already been collected and modeled, querying it, typically with SQL, and presenting the results through spreadsheets, reports or business intelligence dashboards, to answer concrete business questions such as why sales dipped in a region or how a marketing campaign performed. The work is primarily descriptive and diagnostic: explaining what happened and why, more than predicting what will happen next.
This differs from a data scientist, who more often builds predictive or machine-learning models and works with less structured or unmodeled data, and from a data engineer, who builds the pipelines and infrastructure the analyst's queries run against rather than analyzing the data itself. In many organizations, especially smaller ones, the boundaries blur and one person covers parts of all three roles under a single title.
Data analysts matter because they are usually the closest point of contact between raw data and the people making day-to-day decisions, translating a business question into a query and a query's results back into a clear answer. A recurring challenge for the role is being asked for a number without the context of what decision it will inform, which can produce a technically correct answer to the wrong question; building broader data literacy among the stakeholders they support helps close that gap.
Last reviewed September 22, 2026