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And the Pulitzer Prize For SQL Reporting Goes To... (padjo.org)
theodp writes: Over at the Stanford Computational Journalism Lab, Dan Nguyen's Exploring the Wall Street Journal's Pulitzer-Winning Medicare Investigation with SQL is a pretty epic post on how one can use SQL to learn about Medicare data and controversial practices in Medicare billing, giving the reader a better appreciation for what was involved in the WSJ's Medicare Unmasked data investigation. So, how long until a journalist wins a Pulitzer for SQL reporting? And for all you amateur and professional Data Scientists, what data would you want to SELECT if you were a Pulitzer-seeking reporter?
I can certainly appreciate a well written complex piece of SQL. Writing major summary reports in SQL can be unbelievably complex. However, it doesn't need to be complex in order to impress me. It just has to answer the correct question. Particularly true when querying a data warehouse, it is all about getting sums and averages over time periods, right? Now you take those results, throw them into a crosstab engine, start spitting out charts and looking for trends. Then you can start to see the anomalous trends.
An award winning SELECT statement, in my opinion, would simply be one that asks an insightful question.