Eric Meyer’s blog made a request for an online application that spits out custom reports based on their brilliantly put together survey. We’ve been mulling over it a lot in our office, so if you haven’t had a chance to check it out, please do so.

I started looking at the data (they offer it in CSV and Excel), and it’s currently in a state that is difficult for processing via database. I created a script that imported the data into SQL format, but I normalized the data a bit:

• Any multi-valued fields have been broken out to their own tables
• Any range has been broken out into a min and max

I normalized things so queries would make more sense, and I broke some of the responses into ranges to allow for some finer querying (e.g. “How many web professionals between the ages of 25 and 35 make between 55- and 65K?”).

This comes with no warranty, but it looks good to me. If anyone happens to notice anything out of place or incorrect, I’d be glad to know about it so I can fix it up and re-post the data.

ala2007survey.tar.gz

The benevolent among you might consider giving me a line of credit in whatever application you create. :)

Enjoy and happy coding!

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 at 7:26 am and is filed under ala. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.