SQL Saturday Exeter was held Apr24-25 2015 at Jurys Inn Hotel in Exeter. I was excited to be helping at the event for the community again. There were various excellent training day sessions.
The Saturday keynote was the most amazing fun keynote I have seen and a highlight of the event. The video was by Phil Factor about Spinach and Database Development.
Here a few of the points contained within the video on Spinach:
What has spinach got to do with Database Development? Generations of children were fed spinach in preference to more nutritious things, such as cardboard, because of the persistence of bad data.
Guarding the quality of your data is about the most important thing that you as a data professional can do. You may think that performance is important but it would just deliver you the wrong answer faster. Resilience? it would just make it more likely that you’d be able to deliver the wrong answer. Delivery? Yep you got it, the wrong answer quicker.
A good database professional must be unequivocal.
Statistics can help us to make very confident assertions about large datasets if they conform to one of the common distributions but they cannot tell us anything about individual items of data. You can of course remove outliers but in fact outliers are just items of data that don’t conform to your assumptions about the data and the whole point of data analysis is to test your assumptions. By cleaning data, by removing outliers you can prove almost anything scientifically.
I would recommend watching the keynote.
