[Babase] Rankdate Changes in Babase

Jeanne Altmann altj at princeton.edu
Fri Mar 19 16:22:13 EDT 2010


Ah, yes. I assume all of these are 'by' dates.  If not. Something more
is wrong. Thanks for the update on progress.

jeanne

 

From: babase-bounces at eeblistserv.princeton.edu
[mailto:babase-bounces at eeblistserv.princeton.edu] On Behalf Of Lacey
Maryott Roerish
Sent: Friday, March 19, 2010 4:15 PM
To: The Baboon Database Project
Subject: Re: [Babase] Rankdate Changes in Babase

 

Susan, Jeanne, Niki and Karl

 

    I am running into some problems with changing the rankdates to the
first of the month.  There is a rule that the matured date has to be
less than or equal to rank date (With good reason). However, all of the
maturedates that also occur mid-month are throwing an error. So, it
looks as though I will have to roll those back as well. Will pick at
this and try to fix all of the maturedates before rolling the rankdates
back.

 

    I spoke with Karl about this and there is a work-around that could
fix the majority while skipping the ones that violate this rule, but it
kind of seems like if I am going to be elbow deep in the data anyway, I
should just fix the whole problem at once.   Does this fit with how
princeton feels about the timeline of this project?  I expect I can have
it all fixed my mid-morning monday, I just want to do some
cross-checking of maturedates and rankdates and make sure there aren't
any glaring errors before i change a whole bunch of data in 2 tables.

 

Let me know

 

Lacey

On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 3:25 PM, Jeanne Altmann <altj at princeton.edu>
wrote:



-----Original Message-----
From: babase-bounces at eeblistserv.princeton.edu
[mailto:babase-bounces at eeblistserv.princeton.edu] On Behalf Of Karl O.
Pinc
Sent: Friday, March 19, 2010 3:15 PM
To: The Baboon Database Project
Subject: Re: [Babase] Rankdate Changes in Babase

On 03/19/2010 01:48:28 PM, Lacey Maryott Roerish wrote:
> Susan, (et al)
>
>       Jeanne, Karl, Niki and I just finished discussing how to handle
> some
> recent issues discovered in babase related to Rankdates.  It can be
> difficult to extract number of males on a given date if some males
> rankdates
> occur in the middle of the month.  For this reason,  I will be
> changing all
> rankdates (Both BY and ON) to the beginning on the month using a
> function
> Karl had previously developed.  This will simply make querying
> easier,
> and
> will also sync up rankdates data with actual rank data, which are all
> recorded on the 1st of the month.

We will also then put a rule in requiring that rankdates.rnkdate be
on the first of the month.  (Once Lacey let's me know she's done
changing the data.)

The problem has been that nobody ever uses the rnkdate() function,
which sets a date to the first of the month, when comparing
ranks.rnkdate with rankdates.ranked.  They'll still have to use this
function when doing arbitrary date comparisons against either
ranks.rnkdate or, now, rankdates.ranked so we're not really
making the problem go away, but are pushing it farther to the
fringes.  In any case the ranks.rnkdate/rankdate.ranked problem
has been discussed every few years so it's clear there's a
problem there that this change will make go away.


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

Agreed; it will remain a potentially valuable function that we need to
remember the situations you note.  However, with the proposed change, we
will have the ranked-by date regularized, which is good, and we will
make moot the most common use for the function. Thanks Karl for the
patient reminder about the function and all for brainstorming on the
various issues.

jeanne


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-- 
- -
Lacey K. Maryott Roerish
Alberts Lab
Department of Biology
Duke University
ph: 919-660-7306
fax: 919-660-7293
Lacey.Maryott at duke.edu

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