4.12.3: Hands-On Lab Exercise
- Page ID
- 58301
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Hands-On Lab Exercise
Lab: Cleaning a Messy Dataset
Scenario:
You receive a CSV file of 10,000 customer orders with known issues. Write SQL queries or pseudocode to clean each issue.
Issues to address:
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Missing values: 500 orders have NULL shipping_address (required field); 800 have NULL discount_code (optional field)
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Type mismatch: order_total stored as VARCHAR containing "$" signs
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Duplicates: 120 orders appear twice (same order_id)
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Invalid values: 45 orders have negative order_total; 30 have order_date in the future
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Inconsistency: customer_state field contains "CA", "California", "ca", "Calif."
Instructions:
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Profile (15 min): Write queries to quantify each issue (count NULLs, duplicates, invalids).
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Clean (30 min): Write SQL for each fix: handle NULLs (delete vs. flag), CAST types, deduplicate, filter invalids, standardize states.
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Validate (15 min): Write post-cleaning validation queries proving each issue is resolved.
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Document (15 min): Create a cleaning log recording every transformation, rationale, and records affected.
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Impact Analysis (15 min): Calculate what percentage of records were modified or removed. Discuss how this could affect downstream analysis.
Deliverables:
Profiling queries with results, cleaning SQL scripts, validation queries, cleaning log, impact analysis.


