Invitation and roundup from Tim Mitchell
Most of us who work with data have, at least a few times, been presented with a challenge to explore and attempt to make sense of a poorly-defined set of data. Often it’s a collection of text files or Excel documents without any context or documentation. In other cases, it’s a database with no data map or metadata to help explain the purpose of the underlying bits. Sometimes it may be even less structured than that, with the only data points provided being buried in PDF documents or some markup language.
As data professionals, it often falls on us to help turn data into information and insights even with such vague sources. While an eyes-on approach to data review can work, the sheer volume of data requires that we have a set of tools to automate as much of the data discovery process as possible. We all need a good data detective toolkit to aid in solving such mysteries.
What’s in your data detective toolkit?
I’m hosting this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, so here is your challenge: What’s in your data detective toolkit? Share your favorite tricks, methods, language functions (whether T-SQL, Python, or whatever), or software (open-source or commercial) that you’ve found useful in making sense of data mysteries.
I’ll see you back here next week for the roundup post, and I look forward to reading all your posts!