

Ask HN: Tool that learns table structure and produces summary? - dkural

Hi Folks,<p>What tools do you know of out there that can &quot;learn&quot; what&#x27;s in a CSV &#x2F; TSV file, make some smart guesses about the columns,  and provide some sensible metrics &#x2F; summary &#x2F; plots of the data?<p>I know Google Refine, but it doesn&#x27;t quite fit the purpose.  What other stuff is out there?
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gtirloni
Perhaps you can learn something from this:

[http://kimonify.kimonolabs.com/kimload?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww....](http://kimonify.kimonolabs.com/kimload?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kimonolabs.com%2Fwelcome.html)

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dkural
This is pretty amazing. Yes, this is in the right direction :) In a way what I
have in mind is simpler: The data is already more structured, but since it is
a big blob of rows, the user has no idea of relative proportions of things in
it and needs to spend a lot of time querying, plotting etc.

So the steps would be: #1 Recognize the data types sensibly (Kimono-like) #2
Size-up the data, give user some feel for the overall content.

Any tools that do #2?

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tzm
I wrote Spreadsheet.io that is similar to Google Refine (and Fusion Tables)
and performs various data type analysis for visualization, etc. There's also a
native Excel add-in that enables a Javascript API bridge to an existing sheet.
Working on a release.. it's been a side project.

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vittore
SSIS can do it (suggest columns feature). Also from MS SQL MS you can do the
same through the "Import Data" which basically creates one time SSIS package.

