Project 1

Dear sir/madam,

Please find attached my submission file for this module's first project. The project was quite enjoyable to work through and really made a lot of concepts taught up to this point click quite well! Using SQL for exploratory data analysis is also an interesting activity. I do have a few notes about my submission file, though:

1. As instructed by point (2), using the import wizard works fine for me up to around 30,000 records after which it begins to slow down exponentially (from ~100 records a second to ~1 record a minute). Because of this, I have made use of the LOAD DATA INFILE command and have retained those lines of code as a part of my SQL script, spanning lines 1 to 55. I have also included detailed explanations for why I have had to use a different import method and have commented out the lines that aren't required for casual running of the script. I would like to point out that in the end, all of the data was successfully imported and I was able to proceed without any issue.
2. Seeing as how the purpose of this project is to inculcate expertise in using SQL as a language while at the same time performing data analysis on the given dataset, I have - in the form of comments throughout my script - included a "running narrative" of sorts of my thought process as I move through the questions. Each question has (presumebly) been designed to draw an insight out of the dataset using SQL; that insight is what I have tried to encapsulate. In other words, I have included comments that explain what I understood from the result of the previous query.
3. I have liberally used UNION SELECTs, CASE clauses and subqueries in order to more appropriately format the results of my queries. Doing so has given me a much deeper and clearer understanding of how SQL works as a language and also satisfies the industrial requirement that data-driven insights have to be effectively communicated to all stakeholders. The impact of good formatting in this case definitely helps.

Awaiting your feedback,

Best regards,

Rahul Singh