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Data & Formats

Parsing file formats, databases, data mining, and enrichment.

Data & Formats
Data Normalization: One Term, Three Different Meanings

Three unrelated jobs share the name data normalization: relational normal forms, canonicalization of values, and feature scaling for models. How to tell which is meant, and what fails in each.

23 March · 22 min
Data & Formats
PHP Bulk Insert with Rollback Using Prepared Statements

PHP bulk insert with prepared statements and rollback: timings for three methods on 20,000 rows, the 65,535-placeholder ceiling, and six cases where the rollback quietly does nothing.

21 March · 21 min
Data & Formats
Hierarchical Data Storage: Design Patterns for Processing

Adjacency list, materialized path, nested set and closure table measured against each other on the same 100,000-node tree in PostgreSQL 16: subtree reads, ancestor lookups, the direct-children query most comparisons skip, and what a single leaf insert costs in each. Checked against vendor documentation in August 2026.

15 March · 25 min
Data & Formats
Document Data Extraction: Formats, Libraries, Approaches

Every document format in one place, with numbers read from primary sources on 10 August 2026: current library versions, Textract and Document AI prices per 1,000 pages, hard API page limits, and a timed comparison of five PDF text extractors on the same file.

5 March · 21 min
Data & Formats
Easy Data Visualization Tools for Scraped Data

No-code chart and map tools for scraped data, with August 2026 prices, documented row and file limits, and data residency for each.

27 February · 16 min
Data & Formats
Data Cleansing in SQL: Find and Remove Duplicate Rows

Find duplicate rows in SQL and print their ids: GROUP BY and ROW_NUMBER recipes checked against MySQL 8.4, PostgreSQL 18, SQL Server 2025 and Oracle 26ai docs in August 2026, with the id-list truncation limits and measured delete timings.

1 February · 18 min
Data & Formats
Frequent Itemset Mining in Data Mining Explained

Frequent itemset mining with measured numbers: Apriori against FP-Growth and H-Mine on 50,000 baskets, how many rules pure noise produces, why Spark runs PFP and not SON, and every library version read from its own registry on 13 August 2026.

20 January · 20 min
Data & Formats
Data Mining for Business Analytics: A Practical Guide

How data mining serves business analytics: the CRISP-DM cycle and where it stalls, six techniques and the mistake each one invites, and every Google analytics service rechecked in August 2026 with real limits and prices, from 14-month event retention in GA4 to BigQuery at $6.25 per TiB.

8 January · 18 min
Data & Formats
CSV Parser Guide: Delimiters, Quotes, and Encodings

How CSV parsing breaks, measured on 13 August 2026: BOM, delimiter and ragged-row behaviour across Python, pandas 3.0.2, Papa Parse 5.5.4, PHP 8.4.21, Go and DuckDB, with throughput numbers.

25 December · 11 min