Visual SQL

Daisy is obviously very-'Visual'. But 'SQL' it is not.

This section shows how to apply simple and not-so-simple visual selections on an 'And' and 'Or' basis to Daisy Charts.

Just follow each of the sections in order to see how you can perform complex selections using the mouse.

Typical Chart

The Daisy Chart shown here is a classic Day of the Week (Sun, Mon etc.) and Hour of the Day (5, 6, 7 etc.) chart, based on the 'Software Test' example.

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Note that the first mapping field is Date mapped by Day of Week and the second is Time mapped by Hour of the Day.

Selecting Data

The preferred way to perform complicated selections on a Daisy Chart is to use the 'Point and Click' selection from the View menu.

'Point and Click' is the simple mouse-based selection method, used to choose nodes, when viewing selected links, nodes and records.

Each node to be selected is pointed to with the mouse and then the left button is clicked to select that node. This is repeated until all nodes have been selected.

Clicking anywhere else, then causes the selection to be performed.

When selecting nodes, as in Selected Nodes, each of the nodes chosen will be added to the displayed Daisy Grid.

With records, as in Selected Records, all of the records, underlying each of the nodes in the same mapping field, are combined or 'or'ed together. Then only those records that are named for each mapping field will be displayed.

Repeat Analysis

One of the most common analyses in any Data Mining System is to select data according to a complicated selection criteria before the analysis.

Typically this will be set using SQL.

Daisy provides a very simple and viable alternative.

1. Using the techniques described earlier in the section, set up a Daisy Chart, that uses nodes that map to the selection criteria you want to use.

2. It is recommended that this chart is defined as a template, so that it can repeated easily on a new database.

3. Use the 'Point and Click' selection described under Selecting Data to select the records you want to process.

4. The data in the Daisy Grid can then be exported to Microsoft Excel or a CSV file, which can then be processed in the normal way.

With larger versions of Daisy, you can also use 'Daisy...' in the Daisy Grid to call a second copy of the program.