Assignment – SQL and R
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Assignment – SQL and R
Choose six recent popular movies. Ask at least five people that you know (friends, family, classmates, imaginary
friends if necessary) to rate each of these movies that they have seen on a scale of 1 to 5. Take the results
(observations) and store them in a SQL database of your choosing. Load the information from the SQL database
into an R dataframe.
This is by design a very open-ended assignment. In general, there’s no need here to ask “Can I…?” questions
about your proposed approach. A variety of reasonable approaches are acceptable. You could for example
access the SQL data directly from R, or you could create an intermediate .CSV file. I should be able to generate
the SQL table(s) and data from your provided code—if you use a graphical user interface to create and populate
tables, it should have a mechanism to generate corresponding SQL code.
This assignment does not need to be 100% reproducible. You can (and should) blank out your SQL password if
your solution requires it; otherwise, full credit requires that your code is “reproducible,” with the assumption
that I have the same database server and R software.
Handling missing data is a foundational skill when working with SQL or R. To receive full credit, you should
demonstrate a reasonable approach for handling missing data. After all, how likely is it that all five of your
friends have seen all six movies?
You’re encouraged to optionally find other ways to make your solution better. For example, consider
incorporating one or more of the following suggestions into your solution:
• Use survey software to gather the information.
• Are you able to use a password without having to share the password with people who are viewing your
code? There are a lot of interesting approaches that you can uncover with a little bit of research.
• While it’s acceptable to create a single SQL table, can you create a normalized set of tables that
corresponds to the relationship between your movie viewing friends and the movies being rated?
• Is there any benefit in standardizing ratings? How might you approach this?
You should post any code (e.g. SQL and R Markdown) in a GitHub repository, and provide a link in your
