Lev Lazinskiy

Converting CSV to a SQLite Database

As a part of my data science course on EdX we have been working with a lot of csv files. I spoke SQL long before I spoke Pandas and I find that it is much easier to do initial exploration of the data using raw SQL queries compared to the Pandas DSL.

Kaggle is a great repository full of useful data sets that are ripe for exploration. While a lot of these data sets come in both csv and sql flavors, some of them are CSV only. Using SQLit we are able to easily import these csv files into a database and then run queries for further data exploration. 

Im going to use the kickstarter data set for this tutorial, feel free to download the csv files from kaggle so that you can follow along. 

Pre Requisites

Make sure that you have SQLite installed before getting started with this tutorial. 

Steps to Convert CSV to SQLite

First, Download the data set from kaggle, this will come in the form of a zip file. Unzip this and open up a terminal in the directory where you have the new unzipped kickstarter-projects folder. 

In your terminal open up a new sqlite session followed by the name of the file that you want to save your new database to. 

sqlite3 ks.db

Inside of the sqlite shell, change the mode to csv. 

.mode csv

Import the csv file, and add the name of the table that you want the data to be imported into. 

.import kickstarter-projects/ks-projects-201801.csv ks

Verify that everything was imported correctly. Take a look at the schema, and first couple of rows. Your output should look something like this: 

sqlite> .schema ks

CREATE TABLE ks(
  "ID" TEXT,
  "name" TEXT,
  "category" TEXT,
  "main_category" TEXT,
  "currency" TEXT,
  "deadline" TEXT,
  "goal" TEXT,
  "launched" TEXT,
  "pledged" TEXT,
  "state" TEXT,
  "backers" TEXT,
  "country" TEXT,
  "usd pledged" TEXT,
  "usd_pledged_real" TEXT,
  "usd_goal_real" TEXT
);


sqlite> select * from ks limit 5;

1000002330|The Songs of Adelaide & Abullah|Poetry|Publishing|GBP|2015-10-09|1000.00|2015-08-11 12:12:28|0.00|failed|0|GB|0.00|0.00|1533.95
1000003930|Greeting From Earth: ZGAC Arts Capsule For ET|Narrative Film|Film & Video|USD|2017-11-01|30000.00|2017-09-02 04:43:57|2421.00|failed|15|US|100.00|2421.00|30000.00
1000004038|Where is Hank?|Narrative Film|Film & Video|USD|2013-02-26|45000.00|2013-01-12 00:20:50|220.00|failed|3|US|220.00|220.00|45000.00
1000007540|ToshiCapital Rekordz Needs Help to Complete Album|Music|Music|USD|2012-04-16|5000.00|2012-03-17 03:24:11|1.00|failed|1|US|1.00|1.00|5000.00
1000011046|Community Film Project: The Art of Neighborhood Filmmaking|Film & Video|Film & Video|USD|2015-08-29|19500.00|2015-07-04 08:35:03|1283.00|canceled|14|US|1283.00|1283.00|19500.00

Excellent! Now you can query this entire data set as your normally would. Happy data exploration!