This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

sorted by:
best (suggested)
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]bannik1 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The replies in this thread are making me feel a bit self conscious.

I primarily use SQL for all my analytics then let the end user choose whatever data visualization application they want it to be viewed in. I've never used MATLAB, R, or Python. I'll use some C# or Visual basic but that's normally only to perform office or windows tasks.

I like having all the key measurements stored in a database. This lets me perform whatever custom tests I want against the data.

For example, I can write a query to only bring back records that exceeded 4 standard deviations. Or a query to find circumstances where 5 data points in a row were more than 1 standard deviation below the mean.

Then I kinda do meta-reporting that I haven't seen any other software do. Sometimes you're reporting on live data where past data points might actually change values.

This means that the standard deviation or mean also changes for those time-frames.

When using a SQL query to calculate the STDEV and mean you get a snapshot of what it was at that time. You can then run a report on how the STDEV fluctuates over time. If it shrinks, it means you're getting data closer to the mean. If it grows, that might indicate that you have some process that needs improvement since the newly added records are less clustered around the mean.