Chapter 12. Relational Databases: Can you relate?
How do you structure really, really multivariate data?
A spreadsheet has only two dimensions: rows and columns. And if you have a bunch of dimensions of data, the tabular format gets old really quickly. In this chapter, you’re about to see firsthand where spreadsheets make it really hard to manage multivariate data and learn how relational database management systems make it easy to store and retrieve countless permutations of multivariate data.
The Dataville Dispatch wants to analyze sales
The Dataville Dispatch is a popular news magazine, read by most of Dataville’s residents. And the Dispatch has a very specific question for you: they want to tie the number of articles per issue to sales of their magazine and find an optimum number of articles to write.
They want each issue be as cost effective as possible. If putting a hundred articles in each issue doesn’t get them any more sales than putting fifty articles in each issue, they don’t want to do it. On the other hand, if fifty article issues correlate to more sales than ten article issues, they’ll want to go with the fifty articles.
They’ll give you free advertising for your analytics business for a year if you can give them a thorough analysis of these variables.
Here’s the data they keep ...
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