250. Structuring filters for Ad Hoc analysis

Now that you have database access let’s discuss some tips for writing and organizing your research and queries.

This one comes from a Data Analyst colleague of mine. I noticed that the first filter in all of his queries is always 1 = 1 (which is always TRUE and doesn’t affect query results):

SELECT * FROM users WHERE 1 = 1 AND country = 'us' AND status = 'customer'

The idea is that when you’re researching something you often look at different slices of data by commenting filters out like so:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE 1 = 1 AND country = 'us' --...
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-- Type your query here, for example this one -- lists all records from users table: SELECT * FROM users
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