Heard about the Developer Shed December Giveaway? Peter has a method useful for all things statistical. In this article, Peter shows us how you can make use of some quick methods to generate statistics for your sites or projects in as little time as possible. Using MS Access and a little SQL code, Peter is able to devise an algorithm useful for determining this month's winner.
Lies, Damn Lies, Statistics, and SQL - Finding the Data (Page 2 of 6 )
If you go to the Dev Articles site, and look at the left sidebar, you’ll find all the category descriptions followed by the number of articles in that category. Click on “PHP” to navigate to the most popular subject. You’ll be presented with a list of the most recent submissions. Scroll to the bottom of the page, find and click the link to the full list of articles. This is where we will find detailed information about each submission.
Again the articles are sorted by the most recent submission – not a format that is particularly useful to us at the moment. You could probably eyeball the list and form a fairly accurate opinion of the most popular and most prolific authors, but we want to be objective and precise, so we’re going to import this data into a database. There’s far too much data here to even contemplate manual data entry. Let’s see how we might import it with the least effort.