Covid19 Data Exploration and Visualization

This project was taken from Alex the Analyst were the purpose was to run various SQL queries to explore a Covid19 dataset and then visualize the results of the data queries using Tableau. Instead of doing the project exactly how he did it on his YouTube tutorial I decided to challenge myself and take a different approach. First, I decided to use Azure Data Studio instead of Microsoft Sql Management Studio. Also before this project I had never used any form or products on the Azure platform so I decided this was the perfect time to give that a try as well. I was super excited since most of my PCs are either running Ubuntu or Fedora and Azure Studio was available for both. So after creating an Azure SQL Database server on Azure I was off to the races. The Github link to the project can be found here https://github.com/datalama14/DataSatori

Challenges: So this project wasn't without its challenges and boy did I have some. So I quickly found out at the time that Azure Data Studio doesn't support importing Excel files to the database and only csv files. Not a huge problem but since this was a large dataset while importing to ADS you would have to change each columns data to the problem attributes which time wise is not very efficient. Okay, no big deal. I fired up my Windows 11 machine, downloaded SSMS which could import Excel files. Problem solved right? No, lol. Turned out SSMS only comes with a 32-bit Excel import app and I needed a 64-bit. The only problem was the 64-bit app was only available with Microsoft SQL server. Downloaded SQL server express just in order to have the 64-bit import . While importing the excel file saw that the importer was naming the database wrong. Decided to import as a flat csv file instead and thought everything was ok and basic queries worked with no issue. However when doing calculations noticed I was getting a charvar error and tried cast to convert char to int but calculations were not working. Realized importing as a csv imported all columns as char and not the numbers as int. So I went back to 64-bit import and imported as excel and realized I could manually change the database name to whatever I wanted. Finally figured out how to changed the name and uploaded excel files . Calculation worked as the columns were imported correctly. I did noticed Azure Data Studio lacked some of the functionality as SSMS so had to work between both applications.

Lessons Learned: As a Data Analyst there will be times were you will have to quickly learn on the fly new applications, software and use a combination of various tools to do the job. You never know when you may work in an environment were the OS and applications needed may not work or have certain limitations and it is import to know how to pivot at any given moment.