[ddj] SQL Vs Excel Vs Refine

Mon Apr 29 05:46:18 UTC 2013

I never learned Refine but I did learn SQL. There's a whole lot to
learn in SQL, but for data journalism, just being able to do a single
SELECT query against a single table may be all you ever need. Really,
I'd learn scraping and regular expressions before I went to SQL, given
that Excel can handle millions of rows.

On Sun, Apr 28, 2013 at 9:37 PM, Andrew Duffy
<andrewjamesduffy at gmail.com> wrote:
> Question:
>
> Are there any data journalists/devs out there that can advise as to whether
> it's worth learning SQL? So far a combination of Excel/Google Refine has
> been more than enough for dumping, organising, and cleaning my data
> projects, but I have only worked with spreadsheets up to ~500 rows.
>
> What can SQL do that refine/excel can't?
>
> --
>
> Andrew Duffy - Journalist
>
>
>
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