Key Word(s): Databases, SQL, Joins



Lecture 23

Thursday, November 21st 2019

Joins with SQLite, pandas

Starting Up

You can connect to the saved database from last time if you want. Alternatively, for extra practice, you can just recreate it from the datasets provided in the .txt files. That's what I'll do.

Comments

You should make a copy of this notebook and call it Lecture23_Exercises.ipynb. Do all excercises in a single cell immediately after the Exercise statement.

In [ ]:
import sqlite3
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import time
pd.set_option('display.width', 500)
pd.set_option('display.max_columns', 100)
pd.set_option('display.notebook_repr_html', True)

db = sqlite3.connect('L23DB_demo.sqlite')
cursor = db.cursor()
cursor.execute("DROP TABLE IF EXISTS candidates")
cursor.execute("DROP TABLE IF EXISTS contributors")
cursor.execute("PRAGMA foreign_keys=1")

cursor.execute('''CREATE TABLE candidates (
               id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY NOT NULL, 
               first_name TEXT, 
               last_name TEXT, 
               middle_init TEXT, 
               party TEXT NOT NULL)''')

db.commit() # Commit changes to the database

cursor.execute('''CREATE TABLE contributors (
          id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT NOT NULL, 
          last_name TEXT, 
          first_name TEXT, 
          middle_name TEXT, 
          street_1 TEXT, 
          street_2 TEXT, 
          city TEXT, 
          state TEXT, 
          zip TEXT, 
          amount REAL, 
          date DATETIME, 
          candidate_id INTEGER NOT NULL, 
          FOREIGN KEY(candidate_id) REFERENCES candidates(id))''')

db.commit()

with open ("candidates.txt") as candidates:
    next(candidates) # jump over the header
    for line in candidates.readlines():
        cid, first_name, last_name, middle_name, party = line.strip().split('|')
        vals_to_insert = (int(cid), first_name, last_name, middle_name, party)
        cursor.execute('''INSERT INTO candidates 
                  (id, first_name, last_name, middle_init, party)
                  VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?, ?)''', vals_to_insert)

with open ("contributors.txt") as contributors:
    next(contributors)
    for line in contributors.readlines():
        cid, last_name, first_name, middle_name, street_1, street_2, \
            city, state, zip_code, amount, date, candidate_id = line.strip().split('|')
        vals_to_insert = (last_name, first_name, middle_name, street_1, street_2, 
                          city, state, int(zip_code), amount, date, candidate_id)
        cursor.execute('''INSERT INTO contributors (last_name, first_name, middle_name, 
                           street_1, street_2, city, state, zip, amount, date, candidate_id) 
                           VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?)''', vals_to_insert)

candidate_cols = [col[1] for col in cursor.execute("PRAGMA table_info(candidates)")]
contributor_cols = [col[1] for col in cursor.execute("PRAGMA table_info(contributors)")]

def viz_tables(cols, query):
    q = cursor.execute(query).fetchall()
    framelist = dict()
    for i, col_name in enumerate(cols):
        framelist[col_name] = [col[i] for col in q]
    return pd.DataFrame.from_dict(framelist)

from IPython.display import display

Recap

Last time, you played with a bunch of SQLite commands to query and update the tables in the database.

One thing we didn't get to was how to query the contributors table based off of a query in the candidates table. For example, suppose you want to query which contributors donated to Obama. You could use a nested SELECT statement to accomplish that.

In [ ]:
query = '''SELECT * FROM contributors WHERE candidate_id = (SELECT id from candidates WHERE last_name = "Obama")'''
display(viz_tables(contributor_cols, query))

Joins

The last example involved querying data from multiple tables.

In particular, we combined columns from the two related tables (related through the FOREIGN KEY).

This leads to the idea of joining multiple tables together. SQL has a set of commands to handle different types of joins. SQLite does not support the full suite of join commands offered by SQL but you should still be able to get the main ideas from the limited command set.

We'll begin with the INNER JOIN.

INNER JOIN

The idea here is that you will combine the tables if the values of certain columns are the same between the two tables. In our example, we will join the two tables based on the candidate id. The result of the INNER JOIN will be a new table consisting of the columns we requested and containing the common data. Since we are joining based off of the candidate id, we will not be excluding any rows.

Example

Here are two tables. Table A has the form:

nA attr idA
s1 23 0
s2 7 2

and table B has the form:

nB attr idB
t1 60 0
t2 14 7
t3 22 2

Table A is associated with Table B through a foreign key on the id column.

If we join the two tables by comparing the id columns and selecting the nA, nB, and attr columns then we'll get

nA A.attr nB B.attr
s1 23 t1 60
s2 7 t3 22

The SQLite code to do this join would be

SELECT nA, A.attr, nB, B.attr FROM A INNER JOIN B ON B.idB = A.idA

Notice that the second row in table B is gone because the id values are not the same.

Thoughts

What is SQL doing with this operation? It may help to visualize this with a Venn diagram. Table A has rows with values corresponding to the idA attribute. Column B has rows with values corresponding to the idB attribute. The INNER JOIN will combine the two tables such that rows with common entries in the id attributes are included. We essentially have the following Venn diagram.

Exercises

  1. Using an INNER JOIN, join the candidates and contributors tables by comparing the candidate_id and candidates_id columns. Display your joined table with the columns contributors.last_name, contributors.first_name, and candidates.last_name.
  2. Do the same inner join as in the last part, but this time append a WHERE clause to select a specific candidate's last name.

LEFT JOIN or LEFT OUTER JOIN

There are many ways to combine two tables. We just explored one possibility in which we combined the tables based upon the intersection of the two tables (the INNER JOIN).

Now we'll talk about the LEFT JOIN or LEFT OUTER JOIN.

In words, the LEFT JOIN is combining the tables based upon what is in the intersection of the two tables and what is in the "reference" table.

We can consider our toy example in two guises:

Example A

Let's do a LEFT JOIN of table B from table A. That is, we'd like to make a new table by putting table B into table A. In this case, we'll consider table A our "reference" table. We're comparing by the id column again. We know that these two tables share ids 0 and 2 and table A doesn't have anything else in it. The resulting table is:

nA A.attr nB B.attr
s1 23 t1 60
s2 7 t3 22

That's not very exciting. It's the same result as from the INNER JOIN. We can do another example that may be more enlightening.

Example B

Let's do a LEFT JOIN of table A from table B. That is, we'd like to make a new table by putting table A into table B. In this case, we'll consider table B our "reference" table. Again, we use the id column from comparison. We know that these two tables share ids 0 and 2. This time, table B also contains the id 7, which is not shared by table A. The resulting table is:

nA A.attr nB B.attr
s1 23 t1 60
None NaN t2 14
s2 7 t3 22

Notice that SQLite filed in the missing entries for us. This is necessary for completion of the requested join.

The SQLite commands to accomplish all of this are:

SELECT nA, A.attr, nB, B.attr FROM A LEFT JOIN B ON B.idB = A.idA

and

SELECT nA, A.attr, nB, B.attr FROM B LEFT JOIN A ON A.idA = B.idB

Here is a visualization using Venn diagrams of the LEFT JOIN.

Exercises

Use the following two tables to do the first two exercises in this section. Table A has the form:

nA attr idA
s1 23 0
s2 7 2
s3 15 3
s4 31 7

and table B has the form:

nB attr idB
t1 60 0
t2 14 7
t3 22 2
  1. Draw the table that would result from a LEFT JOIN using table A as the reference and the id columns for comparison.
  2. Draw the table that would result from a LEFT JOIN using table B as the reference and the id columns for comparison.
  3. Now back to the candidates and their contributors. Create a new table with the following form:
average contribution candidate last name
... ...

The table should be created using the LEFT JOIN clause on the contributors table by joining the candidates table by the id column. The average contribution column should be obtained using the AVG SQL function. Finally, you should use the GROUP BY clause on the candidates last name.


pandas

We've been working with databases for the last few lectures and learning SQLite commands to work with and manipulate the databases. There is a Python package called pandas that provides broad support for data structures. It can be used to interact with relationsional databases through its own methods and even through SQL commands.

In the last part of this lecture, you will get to redo a bunch of the database exercises using pandas.

We won't be able to cover pandas from the ground up, but it's a well-documented library and is fairly easy to get up and running. Here's the website: pandas.

Reading a datafile into pandas

In [ ]:
# Using pandas naming convention
dfcand = pd.read_csv("candidates.txt", sep="|")
dfcand
In [ ]:
dfcontr = pd.read_csv("contributors.txt", sep="|")
dfcontr

Reading things in is quite easy with pandas.

Notice that pandas populates empty fields with NaN values.

The id column in the contributors dataset is superfluous. Let's delete it.

In [ ]:
del dfcontr['id']
dfcontr.head()

Very nice! And we used the head method to print out the first five rows.

Creating a Table with pandas

We can use pandas to create tables in a database.

First, let's create a new database since we've already done a lot on our test database.

In [ ]:
dbp = sqlite3.connect('L21_pandas_DB.sqlite')
csr = dbp.cursor()
csr.execute("DROP TABLE IF EXISTS candidates")
csr.execute("DROP TABLE IF EXISTS contributors")
csr.execute("PRAGMA foreign_keys=1")

csr.execute('''CREATE TABLE candidates (
               id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY NOT NULL, 
               first_name TEXT, 
               last_name TEXT, 
               middle_name TEXT, 
               party TEXT NOT NULL)''')

dbp.commit() # Commit changes to the database

csr.execute('''CREATE TABLE contributors (
          id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT NOT NULL, 
          last_name TEXT, 
          first_name TEXT, 
          middle_name TEXT, 
          street_1 TEXT, 
          street_2 TEXT, 
          city TEXT, 
          state TEXT, 
          zip TEXT, 
          amount REAL, 
          date DATETIME, 
          candidate_id INTEGER NOT NULL, 
          FOREIGN KEY(candidate_id) REFERENCES candidates(id))''')

dbp.commit()

Last time, we opened the data files with Python and then manually used SQLite commands to populate the individual tables. We can use pandas instead like so.

In [ ]:
dfcand.to_sql("candidates", dbp, if_exists="append", index=False)

How big is our table?

In [ ]:
dfcand.shape

We can visualize the data in our pandas-populated table. No surprises here except that pandas did everything for us.

In [ ]:
query = '''SELECT * FROM candidates'''
csr.execute(query).fetchall()

Querying a table with pandas

One Way

In [ ]:
dfcand.query("first_name=='Mike' & party=='D'")

Another Way

In [ ]:
dfcand[(dfcand.first_name=="Mike") & (dfcand.party=="D")]

More Queries

In [ ]:
dfcand[dfcand.middle_name.notnull()]
In [ ]:
dfcand[dfcand.first_name.isin(['Mike', 'Hillary'])]

Exercises

  1. Use pandas to populate the contributors table.
  2. Query the contributors tables with the following:
    1. List entries where the state is "VA" and the amount is less than $\$400.00$.
    2. List entries where the state is "NULL".
    3. List entries for the states of Texas and Pennsylvania.
    4. List entries where the amount contributed is between $\$10.00$ and $\$50.00$.

Sorting

In [ ]:
dfcand.sort_values(by='party')
In [ ]:
dfcand.sort_values(by='party', ascending=False)

Selecting Columns

In [ ]:
dfcand[['last_name', 'party']]
In [ ]:
dfcand[['last_name', 'party']].count()
In [ ]:
dfcand[['first_name']].drop_duplicates()
In [ ]:
dfcand[['first_name']].drop_duplicates().count()

Exercises

  1. Sort the contributors table by amount and order in descending order.
  2. Select the first_name and amount columns.
  3. Select the last_name and first_name columns and drop duplicates.
  4. Count how many there are after the duplicates have been dropped.

Altering Tables

Creating a new column is quite easy with pandas.

In [ ]:
dfcand['name'] = dfcand['last_name'] + ", " + dfcand['first_name']
dfcand

We can change an existing field as well.

In [ ]:
dfcand.loc[dfcand.first_name == "Mike", "name"]
In [ ]:
dfcand.loc[dfcand.first_name == "Mike", "name"] = "Mikey"
In [ ]:
dfcand.query("first_name == 'Mike'")

You may recall that SQLite doesn't have the functionality to drop a column. It's a one-liner with pandas.

In [ ]:
del dfcand['name']
dfcand

Exercises

  1. Create a name column for the contributors table with field entries of the form "last name, first name"
  2. For contributors from the state of "PA", change the name to "X".
  3. Delete the newly created name column.

Aggregation

We'd like to get information about the tables such as the maximum amount contributed to the candidates. Here are a bunch of ways to describe the tables.

In [ ]:
dfcand.describe()

It's not very interesting with the candidates table because the candidates table only has one numeric column.

Exercise

Use the describe() method on the contributors table.

I'll use the contributors table to do some demos now.

In [ ]:
dfcontr.amount.max()
In [ ]:
dfcontr[dfcontr.amount==dfcontr.amount.max()]
In [ ]:
dfcontr.groupby("state").sum()
In [ ]:
dfcontr.groupby("state")["amount"].sum()
In [ ]:
dfcontr.state.unique()

There is also a version of the LIMIT clause. It's very intuitive with pandas.

In [ ]:
dfcand[0:3]

The usual Python slicing works just fine!

Joins with pandas

pandas has some some documentation on joins: Merge, join, and concatenate. If you want some more reinforcement on the concepts from earlier regarding JOIN, then the pandas documentation may be a good place to get it.

You may also be interested in a comparison with SQL.

To do joins with pandas, we use the merge command.

Here's an example of an explicit inner join:

In [ ]:
cols_wanted = ['last_name_x', 'first_name_x', 'candidate_id', 'id', 'last_name_y']
dfcontr.merge(dfcand, left_on="candidate_id", right_on="id")[cols_wanted]

Somewhat organized example

In [ ]:
dfcontr.merge(dfcand, left_on="candidate_id", right_on="id")[cols_wanted].groupby('last_name_y').describe()

Other Joins with pandas

We didn't cover all possible joins because SQLite can only handle the few that we did discuss. As mentioned, there are workarounds for some things in SQLite, but not evertyhing. Fortunately, pandas can handle pretty much everything. Here are a few joins that pandas can handle:

  • LEFT OUTER (already discussed)
  • RIGHT OUTER - Think of the "opposite" of a LEFT OUTER join (shade the intersection and right set in the Venn diagram).
  • FULL OUTER - Combine everything from both tables (shade the entire Venn diagram)

Left Outer Join with pandas

In [ ]:
dfcontr.merge(dfcand, left_on="candidate_id", right_on="id", how="left")[cols_wanted]

Right Outer Join with pandas

In [ ]:
dfcontr.merge(dfcand, left_on="candidate_id", right_on="id", how="right")[cols_wanted]

Full Outer Join with pandas

In [ ]:
dfcontr.merge(dfcand, left_on="candidate_id", right_on="id", how="outer")[cols_wanted]