[ddj] SQL Vs Excel Vs Refine

Mon Apr 29 06:10:23 UTC 2013

Thanks Ed. I'm getting pretty decent with scraping and regex, still
wondering whether to dive into SQL though. From the surface it looks like
Excel could do something pretty similar to the SELECT query. It seems SQL
is only really needed for incredibly large datasets?

On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 3:46 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb at znmeb.net>wrote:

> 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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