Field note · July 17, 2026

Reading reopened before trusting it in support-tickets

4,000 rows, 2 distinct values, and the one fact about reopened that changes how you query it.

1 min read ·Data quality ·quality practice

Profiling reopened on support-tickets before anyone builds anything on top of it.

4,000 rows, no nulls, 2 distinct values. Whether the ticket was reopened after closing.

It is true in 7.1% of rows — 285 of 4,000.

That imbalance is the single most important fact about the column. It sets the baseline any model has to beat, it decides whether a per-segment breakdown will have enough rows in the minority class to say anything, and it determines how wide the confidence interval on any rate computed from it will be.

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

A base rate this low is the reason accuracy is the wrong metric on anything predicting this column: always predicting false scores 92.9% and learns nothing.

Where this bites: slicing by a dimension with 8 levels leaves roughly 36 true rows per slice on average. That is thin enough that the noisiest segment will look like the most extreme one, every time, and someone will read the ranking as a finding.

The grain is one row per ticket, 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.