Ask HN: Tool that learns table structure and produces summary?

6 points·dkural··4 comments

Hi Folks,

What tools do you know of out there that can "learn" what's in a CSV / TSV file, make some smart guesses about the columns, and provide some sensible metrics / summary / plots of the data?

I know Google Refine, but it doesn't quite fit the purpose. What other stuff is out there?

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Perhaps you can learn something from this:

http://kimonify.kimonolabs.com/kimload?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww....

This is pretty amazing. Yes, this is in the right direction :) In a way what I have in mind is simpler: The data is already more structured, but since it is a big blob of rows, the user has no idea of relative proportions of things in it and needs to spend a lot of time querying, plotting etc.

So the steps would be: #1 Recognize the data types sensibly (Kimono-like) #2 Size-up the data, give user some feel for the overall content.

Any tools that do #2?

I wrote Spreadsheet.io that is similar to Google Refine (and Fusion Tables) and performs various data type analysis for visualization, etc. There's also a native Excel add-in that enables a Javascript API bridge to an existing sheet. Working on a release.. it's been a side project.

SSIS can do it (suggest columns feature). Also from MS SQL MS you can do the same through the "Import Data" which basically creates one time SSIS package.

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