Accessing Data

Once a data flow contains all of the fields you need, you can load it to a target data store. 

To add a new target:

1. Click Targets on the sidebar of the data flow interface, as shown in the following image.

   

2. Click New Target to add a new target to the flow, as shown in the following image.

   

Using Citi Bike trip data, we will restrict our analysis to rides that start in Manhattan, so we can limit the data loaded to just that borough. The geographic data identifies the county, so we will just load the data in New York County.

1. In the COUNTY field, click the bar for New York County.

   The display changes to reflect the selection. The dark portions of the bars in each column show the proportion of rows that are selected, as shown in the following image.

   

The trip data contains station names, IDs, latitudes, and longitudes, but no zip code, city, or county information. To see the zip code and county information, you can download the station station_zip.csv file from http:/techsupport.informationbuilders.com/public/station_zip.csv.

You can add new fields or replace existing fields by creating expressions.

Each filed has a menu icon ( ) 

The menu provides the following options:

By default, all fields in a single-segment data source, or all fields from top segment in a multi-segment data source are automatically added to flow. You can turn off this option in the Advanced Options dialog box.

To edit the fields in the flow, right-click the SQL object, and click Edit. The Metadata and Query panes open.

When a data source in a flow has a large volume of data, you can enable sampling for better response time. You can make decisions based on a sample, provided that sample is representative of the entire data set. Data Prep has a built-capability to automatically generate a random sample (with a 99% confidence level and +/- 1% margin of error).

To enable sampling:

Citi Bike provides data monthly as zipped comma-separated values (.csv) files that contain the following data values:

• Trip Duration (seconds) 
• Start Time and Date
• Stop Time and Date
• Start Station Name
• End Station Name
• Station ID
• Station Latitude/Longitude
• Bike ID
• User Type (Customer = 24-hour pass or 3-day pass user. Subscriber = Annual Member.)
• Gender (Zero=unknown; 1=male; 2=female)
• Year of Birth 

To download a ridership file;