T-SQL Tuesday #179: What’s In Your Data Detective Toolkit?

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.

T-SQL Tuesday rules

So how do you participate in this? The rules are pretty simple.

• Write a blog post answering the above question. Share as little or as much detail as you wish on your favorite tools or methods for solving data mysteries.
• Your blog post should be published one week from today, on October 8th, 2024.
• Include the T-SQL Tuesday logo in your blog post, and add a link on that image that links to this invitation blog post.
• Include a trackback link to this blog post, or add a comment on this blog post linking to your own blog post so I can include you in the roundup of posts next week.
• If you’d like to host T-SQL Tuesday, read the full rules here and contact Steve Jones to request a hosting date.

That’s it. I’ll see you back here next week for the roundup post, and I look forward to reading all your posts!