The new truck accident data is available from the IRE and NICAR Database Library and, as with any data set, you need to learn the pitfalls of the data. Here are some tips for dealing with the problems in truck accident data and ways you can bulletproof your analysis that I learned working on a 2006 truck safety project at The Dallas Morning News:

In most cases, when you want to match data from one table in a database to another, a common approach is to use a JOIN clause in your query.

For example, if you had a list of candidates in one table, and a list of donations made to candidates (with one field having a candidate ID in it), you'd probably either use JOIN clause or a WHERE clause to match them together:

(pseudo-code)

SELECT * FROM candidates, donations where candidates.candidate_id = donations.candidate_id;