Field note · December 11, 2023

Reading exposed_on before trusting it in ab-test-checkout

6,000 rows, 28 distinct values, and the one fact about exposed_on that changes how you query it.

1 min read ·Data quality ·quality practice

Profiling exposed_on on ab-test-checkout before anyone builds anything on top of it.

6,000 rows, no nulls, 28 distinct values. First exposure date.

It runs from 2024-03-04 to 2024-03-31, covering 28 distinct days.

It is a date rather than a timestamp, so there is no time zone to get wrong here. That is worth noticing, because the moment a column like this gains a time component, every daily aggregate silently shifts for anyone not in UTC.

sql
select
  count(*)                     as rows,
  count(exposed_on)            as present,
  count(*) - count(exposed_on) as nulls,
  count(distinct exposed_on)   as distinct_values
from ab_test_checkout;

Check the range before filtering on it. Half the "the dashboard is empty" reports we have seen are a date filter outside the data's actual range, and the query is not wrong so nothing errors.

Where this bites: 28 populated days is what any window function over this column has to work with. A seven-day lag counts rows, not days — so if a day is missing, lag(7) quietly compares against eight days ago and the week-over-week number is wrong in a way that looks plausible.

The grain is one row per exposed user, which is the context every one of those numbers depends on. None of them survive a change of grain, which is why "profile the column" and "profile the table" are the same job. Full schema, and the CSV, on the dataset page.