Programming your own database of results
 

For anyone interested.

I don't mind helping out people if they wish to learn java to program teir own databases for test purposes.

I won't be giving out code but I will definately guide people through some of the more error prone parts.

Anyone who is interested leave a note here.

Good luck.

i've always been interested but never followed through

if you could drop me a line at chucky_s_3000 at yahoo dot com dot au that would be great

cheers wes
cb_fleming@hotmail.com

Hi Wesmip,

I take it your database comes from web scraping. Do you have an online source for race results or are you using a form guide?

Chinbok,

At the moment I just rip the reuslts from unitab (easiest site to scrape).

I was thinking about getting them either from "virtual formguide" or from "expert form" or from "oze form".

You got any other sugggestions ?

Oh for form ... I grab those from the form guides at unitab and the ones at expert form and the ones at virtual formguide.

I check they all match up... quite often they don't.

No. I use Unitab too becuase the urls are easy to program. I also scrape the neurals and winner in six.

Funny you should mention databases wes as I was only thinking of starting my own not long ago. A couple of questions for you or any others who can help, should I use excell or access to store the info in, and which form provider is the easiest to use, as well as having plenty of info , such as position in running, especially for non-metro races as these are where most of my betting is at the moment. I dont mind paying for form as I would like to get all a horses starts, but not a huge amount though, under $ 50 a month would be my budget. I dont want to use it as a system creator, more as an in depth analysis tool, for example i would like to be able to pull up every horse run from any individual barrier and see if there is any common factors from the horses that won or finished close up from that particular barrier, also things like being able to pull up a list of all horses in the db that are trained by a certain trainer and see if I can pick up his/her methods ecetera. Thanks in advance from the doc.

Dr Ron,

Don't use Excel, as the data grows you risk corruption, Access will be far more reliable and you can perform queries much better. Also the data can be split into tables which means you can import form to one table and results to another.

The best form provider is the "virtual" one.

I dont want to use it as a system creator, more as an in depth analysis tool, for example i would like to be able to pull up every horse run from any individual barrier and see if there is any common factors from the horses that won or finished close up from that particular barrier, also things like being able to pull up a list of all horses in the db that are trained by a certain trainer and see if I can pick up his/her methods ecetera.

My database can do this. Also you can export the data to almost any format you want. Might be a starting point as all the data is already in there.

Just a suggestion, as in the longrun it will save you a great deal of expense in past form and results.

Thanks for the comment chrome, I actually gave your "one" some consideration but would ask the question, is there a chance that you would add non-metro stuff to it as I prefer to have family time at the weekends and get most of my betting time midweek? If the answer is yes then you may have a potential customer. The price seems quite reasonable given the amount of time a novice like me would have to spend on doing my own.