In addition to the techniques that we mentioned previously in this chapter, there are some additional possibilities for dealing with data structure issues. It is outside the scope of this book to develop these concepts fully. However, with some familiarity of these approaches, you can broaden your ability to deal with challenges as they arise:
- Custom SQL can be used in the data connection to resolve some data problems. Beyond giving a field for a cross database join, as we saw previously, custom SQL can be used to radically reshape the data that's retrieved from the source. Custom SQL is not an option for all data sources, but is for many relational databases. Consider a custom SQL script that takes the wide table of country populations we mentioned earlier in this chapter and restructures it into a tall table:
SELECT [Country...