[Babase] Males data -- somewhat urgent update

Susan Alberts alberts at duke.edu
Thu Mar 6 13:05:44 EST 2008


Hi Jeanne, Karl, Lacey, Tabby,

I am writing this from Nairobi, as an update on a query that karl,  
Lacey and I have been working on for several days.

When I created the original database of males, I had a file that had  
the following columns:

Sname  Grp  Datein  Dateout

In other words, one row for every period of time that a male was in a  
group. If he was in Alto's 3 separate times, there were 3 rows for  
him in Grp 1. If he was in an unknown group for one or more stretches  
of time, there was one row each of these strecthes in group 9.

I have needed the data in this form from time to time, it is a very  
useful way, for instance, of figuring out how long he spent in each  
group and in how many different time periods.

When babase was created, it seemed clear that converting the data  
from this form to the members form (one row of location data for each  
animals for each day) made sense, because it should be easy to  
reconstruct the original version. We all agreed on this.

however, it turns out not to be easy for some reason none of us gets.  
I've tried from time to time and given up each time. Lacey found  
records of when I tried it with Karen and Karl helped, and we didn't  
manage to do it, and I know I've tried a couple of other times. It  
WOULD be easy if each male had only one period of residency in each  
group. But, we have not yet managed to recreate this original table  
format in all these yeas. This is obviously troubling.

in the interests of not using up any more of Karl's time at the  
moment, Lacey is looking at doing this partly by hand. (We can get a  
partial record using sql and she is proposing to do the rest by  
hand). However, I think it makes sense at this point to put fairly  
high up on our list of things to do when we can afford it, that we  
need to figure out how to do this. It is certainly doable. And, it  
should be a View so that we don't have to reconstruct it.

And, finally, if Lacey finds that it is too big a job to do by hand  
after all (she should know in a day or two) then I'm afraid to say it  
but I think we might need to ask Karl to do it, and I will find the  
money. I will try to get around this but wanted to give a heads up.

Thanks,
susan


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