Ben Nour

  • That time my SQL tips and tricks went viral

    For as long as I've worked as a data analyst I've kept a private Github repository which consists solely of a Markdown file with SQL tips and tricks I've learnt, like using EXCEPT to …

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  • Data cleaning with SQL: filling missing dates

    Filling in missing dates is a common data cleaning task that can be a bit of a curly problem when taking into account different groups of data within a dataset.

    To demonstrate this (and the solutions) I'll be using a table called page_traffic:

    DT PAGE_NAME PAGE_VIEWS
    2024-09-01 Homepage 10
    2024-09-02 …
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  • Using SQL to calculate how often and how many days a store's inventory is out of stock

    Recently a Reddit user posted in r/SQL wanting to know how to calculate how often and how many days an item was out of stock.

    I enjoyed coming up with a solution and …

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  • Creating custom colour palettes in Tableau from the command-line

    Most of the time Tableau's in-built colour palettes are more than suitable for the visualisation you're creating. That said, I also quite like to create my own custom colour palettes and sometimes a manager might ask that you use your company's official brand colours.

    Unfortunately in order to create custom …

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  • Which Sydney LGAs have the lowest and highest unemployment rates?

    Unemployment by LGA in Sydney, Australia

    The Australian government's Jobs and Skills Australia has an insightful dataset I recently came across - quarterly Small Area Labour Markets (SALM) estimates of unemployment and the unemployment rate, broken out by local government area …

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  • Using Spotify's Web API to analyse my Favourite Rock playlist

    Since 2015 I've been adding my most-liked rock songs to the aptly named playlist Favourite Rock.

    I thought it'd be fun to use content metadata from Spotify's Web API to learn more about my …

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  • Splitting a delimited string column into rows using Snowflake

    Do you have a column in your Snowflake table that contains delimited strings that you want to split into individual rows?

    For example, let’s say we have a table called countries_official_languages, which has …

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  • Applying colour conditional formatting to individual table columns in Tableau

    Do you want to conditionally format one column in a Tableau table but attempting to apply colour to a column applies it to everything?

    For example, say I have the following table:

    Tableau table

    I want …

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