Before class
Reading
- "Cheating Our Children" by John Perry, Heather Vogell, Alan Judd and M.B. Pell, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 2012. Presented by Maya Srikrishnan.
- "Concerns in Happy Valley" by Paula Lavigne, Steve Detsohn, Ronnie Forchheimer, Dwayne Bray, David Lubbers and Arty Berko, ESPN, 2008. Presented by Adrian Bonenberger.
Due Monday, March 10 (enjoy the nice weekend!) Get as far as you can on analyzing the table of service calls in New York City for the first two weeks of January, 2014. Expect to have to use SELECT, GROUP BY, ORDER BY and WHERE clauses in your queries. Try to write a lede of a story about what New Yorkers were complaining about in Mayor DeBlasio's first two weeks in office. Be sure to send us a) your lede, and b) a document showing the SQL for the key queries you wrote. We don't need all of them, but there may be several that contribute to your lede. Turn something in, even if you can't get very far. Without it, we can't help you.
NOTE: I made a mistake on the original practice database, which only had one day worth of complaints. Because of the size, I've created another download that you can import into your practice database the same way you did before, this time called janrequests.sql. It contains only two weeks' worth of complaints, from Mayor DeBlasio's first two full weeks in office. If you don't remember how to import, go back to the video and skip to the very end. It'll show you the screens.
In class
- Story reviews
- Go over homework and extra MySQL exercises.
- Review your project proposals with you individually
Resources
MySQL videos, practice data and tip sheets
- Video on installing MySQL on your Macbooks. This includes instructions on how to load the practice data onto your computer. I had trouble starting the SQL Server until I rebooted. Others had trouble with the 10.7 version but found the 10.6 version OK.
- The practice data in the form of a MySQL dump file. As of Sunday morning, it includes the corrected version of New York City service requests, called janrequests.
- Tips for working with MySQL Workbench, including how to get rid of the 1,000-record limit.
- A cheat sheet for how to use MySQL for filtering. If you want to follow along, practice importing the self-contained dump file into your practice database from this file. It has both of the tables that are used in the cheat sheet.
- A cheat sheet for using MySQL for summing and counting using group-by queries.
Structured Query Language is such a standard way to look things up in databases that there are a gizillion tutorials already out in the wild. Being with W3Schools.com. There are slightly different flavors of SQL depending on which software you use, but in general they all have the same features.
There are good IRE tip sheets for Microsoft Access, but none of you have that available to you on your Macs. That said, the tip sheets give you a good overview of WHY you want to graduate from a spreadsheet, and the kinds of things a "relational" database can do that are not ideal in spreadsheets. Take a look at the Q&A's here, even if you won't be using the same software. Remember that you will have to log in to the IRE site to get access to these documents.