Bob Pusateri shows us a new data set to mess with:
A few weeks ago I came across this blog post by Matt Chapman. Matt filed FOIA requests with the City of Chicago and, after multiple attempts, was able to get access to over 36 million parking tickets written between 2003 and 2016. Matt goes on to explain Chicago’s parking ticket database, how he processed the data, analyzed it, and in one location got Chicago to put up additional “No Parking” signs to reduce parking tickets in that spot by 50%. That is most definitely using analytics for a great cause!
But let’s get back to that data for a second, that’s what really interests me. Matt shared his raw data for others to analyze, but it was formatted as a PostgreSQL dump. Now PostgreSQL is a great tool with an even greater price, but it’s not always the easiest to use. After spinning up a Linux VM and spending hours setting everything up as best I could, I still couldn’t get the dump to restore properly. Apparently I didn’t have all the exact versions of certain extensions installed, and because of that the tables couldn’t be loaded. Grrrr.
Bob has our backs, though, and has a properly-formatting, normalized parking ticket data set that weighs in at about 500MB.