Saturday, March 09, 2013

Forsooth, a dataset

Do you ever want a demo or sample dataset that doesn't bore you to death? How about one steaming with sex, murder, and mayhem?

I'll be giving a lightning talk on HTSQL at PyPGDay this Wednesday, and wanted to show it off with some data worthy of its awesomeness. How about Shakespeare? Yeah! Luckily, Open Source Shakespeare has published a database of all Will's works. Unluckily, they've only published it as flat text files and as a Microsoft Access database. ("Open Source" Shakespeare? In a closed-source database? And a horrible one at that? Yeah, I know.)

So I fixed that; opensourceshakespeare on GitHub is a port of the opensourceshakespeare.org data to the RDBMS the Bard himself would have used, PostgreSQL. Porting further to MySQL and SQLite is left as an exercise for the reader (for now; maybe I'll add those after PyCon.)

Enjoy! And if you're ever in Cincinnati, you have GOT to see the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company. They're like... they're like actually eating the food, when all you've done before is look at the recipes.

No comments: