Exploratory Data Analysis in SQL

Start exploring a database by identifying the tables and the foreign keys that link them. Look for missing values, count the number of observations, and join tables to understand how they're related. Learn about coalescing and casting data along the way.

You'll build on functions like min and max to summarize numeric data in new ways. Add average, variance, correlation, and percentile functions to your toolkit, and learn how to truncate and round numeric values too. Build complex queries and save your results by creating temporary tables.

Text, or character, data can get messy, but you'll learn how to deal with inconsistencies in case, spacing, and delimiters. Learn how to use a temporary table to recode messy categorical data to standardized values you can count and aggregate. Extract new variables from unstructured text as you explore help requests submitted to the city of Evanston, IL.

What time is it? In this chapter, you'll learn how to find out. You'll aggregate date/time data by hour, day, month, or year and practice both constructing time series and finding gaps in them.