viziblr

The wonderful StackOverflow team has been making it easy to look through their data using their Data Explorer (read more about it here). I am a frequent visitor to StackOverflow (and SuperUser) and a fan of Visio and wanted to take an opportunity to learn about the Data Explorer and how I could use it to learn something about the kind of questions asked about Visio. A further analysis is come soon, so until then here is a link to the query:

http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/71597

Here is the query as of 2012–06–01.

WITH TargetTags AS (
  SELECT Tags.Id
  FROM Tags
  WHERE Tags.TagName = 'visio'
)

Select
  Posts.Id,
  'http://stackoverflow.com/questions/' + REPLACE(STR(Posts.Id),' ', '') As PostURL,
  Posts.Title,
  Posts.OwnerDisplayName,
  Posts.AcceptedAnswerId,
  Posts.CreationDate,
  Posts.ClosedDate
 
From Posts
INNER JOIN PostTags
  ON Posts.Id = PostTags.PostId
INNER JOIN TargetTags
  ON PostTags.TagId = TargetTags.Id

Please note that I am hardly a SQL expert, so there are –  I'm sure –  simpler and more efficient ways of achieving the same outcome.

Currently it returns just over 350 questions. The results look something link this:

(click to see the larger version)

You can run the query yourself and download the raw CSV.

How it works

• First, I need to find all the Tag Ids I care about. In this case those that are exactly “visio”.
• Second, based on that Tag Id, find all the posts that have been tagged
• NOTE: I had to use REPLACE() instead of LTRIM() because LTRIM() is not supported in the Data Explorer … though why that is the case is not clear to me

It's a pretty simple script, but served as a good learning exercise for me. I hope you find it useful in your own analysis.

Parting Thoughts

• If you build software products that are programmable, service like the Data Explorer will help you get a better understanding or “telemetry data” regarding what developers are interested in or struggling with. You can take advantage of this information to provide better support or steer them in a productive direction.