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Daily Coping Tip Show your appreciation to those who are helping others I also have a thread at SQLServerCentral dealing with coping mechanisms and resources. Feel free to participate.
For many of you out there working in a new way, I'm including a thought of the day on how to cope in this challenging time from The Action for Happiness Coping Calendar. My items will be on my blog, feel free to share yours. |
Missing Data I gather some data regularly about my life. I examine and look for trends and anomalies every week, and use the data in data analysis to help me make decisions. I get this data from my watch, a Garmin Forerunner 645, which tracks a number of data points for me. Some automatically, some I set, but I have come to appreciate that information. Recently I had to get a replacement watch after a bit of a hardware failure. Huge props to Garmin for replacing my out-warranty, 3 year old watch at no cost. I was without a watch for almost two weeks, and I really noticed the lack of data. My watch gathers data on sleep, which I often check to see when I've struggled at night and wake up tired. Where was my time spent? I don't need a high level of accuracy, but something that helps me to think about what I might have done differently the previous day, with diet, with stress, with exercise (or lack) or even emotional coping. I often check the steps, just to see if I've taken breaks and gotten moving, or am I sitting too much. I look at my heart rate, both for the long term trends and the specific exercise to see if I'm trying hard enough. Losing some of this data isn't really a big deal, and it's something we need to account for, but this is a pretty big hole in my system. As I look for trends and compute averages, I need to account for this. If I were building a report for someone, I need to ensure the missing dates are still shown, albeit with no data. I can't enter zeros here, because imagine 2 weeks worth of zeros in a month or resting heart rate data. I might think I'm much more fit than I am! There are plenty of solutions and ways to handle both aggregations and visualizations, but as data professionals, we need to ensure we know how and we do account for missing data points. This becomes especially important with sensor data, but even sales data can be affected. We can, and do lose data for a variety of reasons, and we should also be prepared for those situations. Steve Jones - SSC Editor #BlackLivesMatter Join the debate, and respond to today's editorial on the forums |
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