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Skills / Starter / Check a dataset date range

Starter Data skill

Check a dataset date range

Check a dataset's date range for coverage, timezone, granularity, gaps, future values, duplicates, and expected cutoffs.

Identify which timestamp represents the business event.

When to use

  • Use before period comparisons, joins, reporting, or time-series analysis.
  • Do not silently convert local, UTC, date-only, and effective-period fields into one meaning.

Procedure

  1. Record dataset version, timestamp fields, business definitions, timezone, expected start, expected end, and cadence.
  2. Parse each field with explicit format, locale, timezone, and invalid-value handling.
  3. Calculate minimum, maximum, null, invalid, future, and outlier dates.
  4. Count records by expected interval and identify missing, sparse, duplicate, or unusually dense periods.
  5. Compare event, creation, update, ingestion, and effective timestamps where available.
  6. Check daylight-saving transitions, leap dates, month ends, cutoff boundaries, and partial current periods.
  7. Reconcile coverage to source availability and document intentional exclusions.

Related skills

  • Build a household inventory — Record household property with photos, identifiers, ownership evidence, value basis, and secure backups.
  • Check for duplicate records — Check a dataset for exact, key, and likely duplicate records using explicit business identity and timing rules.
  • Ship a data pipeline — Ship a repeatable data pipeline that survives retries, late records, schema changes, and backfills without corrupting downstream results.