[Babase] Rankdate Changes in Babase

Lacey Maryott Roerish lroerish4 at gmail.com
Fri Mar 19 16:15:21 EDT 2010


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
>
> _______________________________________________
> Babase mailing list
> Babase at www.eco.princeton.edu
> http://www.eco.princeton.edu/mailman/listinfo/babase
>
> _______________________________________________
> Babase mailing list
> Babase at www.eco.princeton.edu
> http://www.eco.princeton.edu/mailman/listinfo/babase
>



-- 
- -
Lacey K. Maryott Roerish
Alberts Lab
Department of Biology
Duke University
ph: 919-660-7306
fax: 919-660-7293
Lacey.Maryott at duke.edu
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://eeblistserv.Princeton.EDU/pipermail/babase/attachments/20100319/cf47b973/attachment-0001.html


More information about the Babase mailing list