This week we’ve incorporated a lot of SQL in our programming. It’s also the first time we’ve dealt with very large data sets. Bringing in all the physician and medical data was the easiest part. However, when we really started slicing and dicing the data, I felt that this was by far the biggest challenge of the course.
Learning SQL itself was not the biggest challenge for me because I have had some experience a few years back (although now I’m pretty rusty). to me, the biggest challenge was knowing where to find and bring in the appropriate data to get the results we were looking for. That in itself is a skill I assume we’ll learn as we go a long, but currently, we are being told what to analyze. Eventually we will want to get to a point where we have knowledge and intuition to start pulling these pieces of analysis i.e. we will know what to look for before we start pulling in random data.
I think this week was probably a big challenge (especially if you don’t have any programming experience whatsoever), but I also think it was a necessary step in our journey. we’re learning dozens of new functions whether in proc SQL or regular data steps, and the charting capabilities are starting to be more apparent as we get used to the UI and have it auto-generate the code for the needed graph.
