[Babase] Census Upload Issues Attn: Susan, Jeanne

Lacey Maryott lacey.maryott at duke.edu
Mon Jun 4 13:41:40 EDT 2007


Hello all,
    I just spoke with Karl about the impending census uploads.  I have 
fixed a few other issues which came up during a compare between FP and 
Babase 2.0 and we just need to run another conversion to make sure 
things have cleaned up.
At some point, we will need to discuss how to handle documentation of 
these changes. For now I have made note of what I changed in the babase 
changelog, however whether or not further documentation is desirable 
should be decided upon as we move away from foxpro. 
  The next step, uploading the census files, raises a question for Susan 
and Jeanne.  The data we have entered in Foxpro for Alto's group spans 
from Sept 1980 to Dec 1989.  However, in Babase 2.0, the end date for 
Alto's is 1988-12-31.  Therefore, the census dates for 1989-01-01 
through 1989-12-31 are going to create problems.  So, there are a couple 
of options for how to handle it.  Karl said the reason this end date was 
picked for Alto's was due to ranks. However, in the new system, an 
animal can be ranked in a subgroup or a supergroup, or both and postgres 
doesn't kick it out as an error. So, we could move the end date for 
Alto's and not have rank conflicts.
    Alternatively, I could go back through and split these census dates 
into subgroups for that year. This doesn't seem to be a trivial job.  
But not impossible.
     Finally, group 1.40 exists and is named "Alto's split".  It begins 
1989-01-01 and ends 1990-07-16.  Karl could not recall what specific 
situation this group had been created for, but I could potentially just 
enter all of the 1989 census data in this group, and make sure to 
document somewhere that if anyone is looking for information on this 
group during this time, they would either need to query using grp 1.40, 
or connect the members table with the groups table and search for any 
member within the 1.00 supergroup.  Instructions for this are in the 
documentation, and additionally could be placed on the Wiki.

I will cut this short, as I know especially for Susan, time online is 
limited... I just wanted to make sure everyone had a full understanding 
of the issue, and what I am asking/proposing for solutions.

The conversion run will be done tomorrow night or wednesday morning, and 
will take about 12 hours. It will take me about that long to finish 
adding females into the census sheets, and around wednesday afternoon or 
thursday, I will be ready to start uploading the new census files using 
whatever protocol is decided on.

thanks so much for your time and consideration, I know its valuable! :)

Take care

Cheers
Lacey

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



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