[Babase] Re: More!

Karl O. Pinc kop at meme.com
Fri Dec 9 16:16:07 EST 2005


On 12/09/2005 02:36:41 PM, Catherine Markham (amarkham at Princeton.EDU)  
wrote:
> 
> I really liked some of the view ideas you came up with - I hadn't
> thought of all those.  The most important for me are (1) recreating
> the current look of the CYCLES table (you've already done that,
> though)

Not exactly, it's still one row per event rather than one row
with all of mdate, tdate, ddate.  From a db perspective working
with one row that has the mdate, tdate, ddate in it is
awkward, so I'm loath to create that view and thereby
encourage people to work with that structure.  (It's difficult
to see what event happened on a particular day because given a
date in some other table you
have to check against 3 columns, some of which
may be NULL, the "between cycles" between a Ddate and
the following Mdate is tricksey-er, etc.)  However, once
the data gets out of the
database it may be essential to have Mdate, Tdate, Ddate all
in a row.  I don't know and have left it for the future.

If we're sure we need one I'd like to wack it out while
I've CYCLES in the brain.  I don't have plans to make it updatable,
unless folks think otherwise.

and (2) maybe coming up with a view for the weather data (max
> temp, min temp, rainfall, station, etc.).  The latter certainly isn't
> a priority - that can wait until after the conversion, but thought I'd
> mention it while it was on my mind.

Weather data views we can do last.

However what about CONSORTDATES, MATUREDATES,
RANKDATES, and DISPERSEDATES?  Should they have some
sort of _SORTED?  If so, what should it sort on, Date
or Sname?  Or is it not worth worrying about?

Karl <kop at meme.com>
Free Software:  "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
                  -- Robert A. Heinlein



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