Hi, I'm Sam Brand

I'm a product manager. Over the past decade I've worked at companies like Stack Overflow, Slader, Quizlet, Papa, and Walmart. Find me on LinkedIn.

This is my personal website. I'm using this space to share tutorials on SQL and analytics concepts which I have used across my career and which I sometimes teach to others. Usually, I teach SQL in-house at companies using proprietary data locked behind a firewall. But that's no use to you. So on this website all tutorials use public data that anyone can query, for free, through BigQuery.

A selection of articles

SQL 101 – How to use BigQuery, Best BigQuery datasets, SQL basics ... to help you if you're just getting started.

SQL for Product Managers – Histograms, Retention, and Funnels to tell stories with data and to validate product decisions.

AI on / for the job - Use local LLMs for NLP on sensitive data, BigQuery for sentiment analysis, and more.

Other – Musings on product management and analytics, such as How I learned SQL, and Why you should, too.

Contact Me

Reach out and say hi!

Let me know if you found this website helpful, if you found an error, or have a question.

I'm always interested in hearing about opportunities to help you or your team.

Find me on LinkedIn or send me a message below.