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Staffelter Hof Winery is Germany's oldest business, established in 862 under the Carolingian dynasty. It has continued to serve customers through dramatic changes in Europe, such as the Holy Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and both world wars. What characteristics enable a business to stand the test of time?

To help answer this question, BusinessFinancing.co.uk researched the oldest company still in business in almost every country and compiled the results into several CSV files. This dataset has been cleaned.

Having useful information in different files is a common problem. While it's better to keep different types of data separate for data storage, you'll want all the data in one place for analysis. You'll use joining and data manipulation to work with this data and better understand the world's oldest businesses.

The Data

data/businesses.csv and data/new_businesses.csv

ColumnDescription
businessName of the business (varchar)
year_foundedYear the business was founded (int)
category_codeCode for the business category (varchar)
country_codeISO 3166-1 three-letter country code (char)

data/countries.csv

ColumnDescription
country_codeISO 3166-1 three-letter country code (varchar)
countryName of the country (varchar)
continentName of the continent the country exists in (varchar)

data/categories.csv

ColumnDescription
category_codeCode for the business category (varchar)
categoryDescription of the business category (varchar)
# Import necessary libraries
import pandas as pd

# Load the data
businesses = pd.read_csv('data/businesses.csv')
new_businesses = pd.read_csv('data/new_businesses.csv')
countries = pd.read_csv('data/countries.csv')
categories = pd.read_csv('data/categories.csv')
businesses.head()
new_businesses.head()
countries.head()
categories.head()
print(businesses.info())
print(new_businesses.info())
print(countries.info())
print(categories.info())
# Start coding here!
# Use as many cells as you like

1 - Find the oldest business on every continent

# How to merge two DataFrames
businesses_country = businesses.merge(countries, on='country_code')
businesses_country.head()
# Group and aggregate data in a DataFrame
continent_oldest = businesses_country.groupby('continent').agg({'year_founded':'min'})
continent_oldest
print(type(continent_oldest))
# Merge two DataFrames on multiple columns
merged = continent_oldest.merge(businesses_country, on=['continent', 'year_founded'])
merged
# Subsetting a DataFrame
oldest_business_continent = merged[['year_founded', 'continent', 'country', 'business']]
oldest_business_continent