Thanks for the replies (and apologies to admin who had to move the thread from the Systems forum - I was coming at it as a database issue-y thing so thought it may have belonged there)


Cheers for the link jazzy. I've been able to find a few more snapshots from the past - as far back as August 1st, 2010 - using the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/2011060...amedHorses.aspx. I had no idea renaming was such a frequent occurrence...


I'm web scraping a basic database of my own and unfortunately the source I'm using, for example, treats It's a Dundeel and Dundeel as two separate horses. The latter had 2 starts, one in Ellerslie and another in Wyong, before the name change went through. Presumably had he returned to NZ Racing he would've been "Dundeel" again.

R&S appear to have two fields in their database to handle name changes (or more, if multiple name changes are allowed, I guess): Horse Name and Old Horse Name (and in this instance Old is It's A Dundeel! Do they track these horses as they enter and exit the country!?).

Here's a confusing example: It's 8-Apr-11 and Bejewelled changes its name to Just Saying. Presumably Bejewelled is an Australian horse as, in the RISA Name Change report, there's no country code in parentheses after its name. If correct, R&S has it as a 2004 mare out of Anabaa and Bacchetto that raced up until 3-Jul-10. There *is* a NZ runner called Bejewelled also, racing at the same time (a 2006 mare out of Pins and Lucida). Now check out the R&S record for Just Saying and....not only was it racing at the same time as the previous two horses, it was a 2004 gelding out of Commands and Winning Table. Now *that's* a gear change...

It appears R&S have applied the name change to the old horse Bejeweled, instead of Bejewelled. Which is a good thing, as RISA used the wrong spelling in their listing (the "old horse" was noted in their list as a 6yo gelding, which fits Bejeweled). ...unless there was *another* horse that was registered as Bejewelled but hadn't raced 'til that point at all.

And this is the FIRST record I looked at!

...no wonder commercial databases are so expensive (insert advertisement here). I'm creating my own more for the intellectual challenge/procrastination, and my betting doesn't warrant the expense though.

Had I remained of the opinion a name change was a freak occurence, I would've been happy enough to ignore the issue and have it unknowingly trip me up once in a while, but now I don't know what to do!