My Experiment with Wolfram|Alpha Facts Windows Azure DataMarket to check world population

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As you may know that Wolfram|Alpha Facts database is accessible directly from web https://www.wolframalpha.com/ also you can subscribe from Windows Azure DataMarket for free of cost to use it within your application and run query. As world population reached 7 Billion I decided to give it a try to see what I will get. So here are the steps:

 

Step 1: Log into https://datamarket.azure.com/ and login using Live account

Step 2: Search for Wolfram|Alpha Facts and signup in your data market account

 

Step 3: Finalize your Wolfram|Alpha Facts subscription

 

 

 

Step 4: Once Wolfram|Alpha Facts subscription is completed you will see it is included in your Data Market account and you can explore the data directly on web.

 

Step 5: There are also other option to explore your data i.e:

- Microsoft Powerpivot for Excel 2010

- Tableau Software

- Using data in your code via Visual Studio

 

 

Step 6: Now I will use the web based version of data viewer “Explore this Dataset” and run the following query to get “World Population” as below:

 

 

Step 7: I will get the results as below:

  •  The result shows the world’s population is still not 7,000,000,000 yet… this is because the database still has population data based on 2009 census. 

 

If I visit the Wolfram|Alpha Facts website and run the same query I will get exact same results:

 

 So it was a nice experiment with data and you can try it by yourself as well.