[Babase] Re: More!
Catherine Markham (amarkham at Princeton.EDU)
amarkham at Princeton.EDU
Fri Dec 9 16:05:33 EST 2005
> 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.
I do like our current CYCLES table, but I guess it is also just that I'm used to it. One of the biggest benefits to it is that the current format helps to avoid errors when I'm entering the data, because I can readily see which cycles are missing needed dates. I'm not sure that makes sense but, regardless, I would not use that as the sole reason to spend time recreating something you loathe. I can just be extra diligent in entering the data a different way - certainly not a big deal.
> 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.
Agreed.
>
> 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?
>
This wouldn't be critical for me - at least no reasons for why I would have to have it sorted come to mind right now.
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