Chrome,

Oracle is industry standard for major applications and is one of the leading databases. It can easy handle rankings based on date, track & race number.

Doing a search of over 400,000 entries takes a little over 5 secs for the majority of searches I do ( which includes counts, sums, multiplication, mins, averages, substrings all in the same query).

Good Luck.

Ok for those I missed on here sending an email to here is what I sent to a couple of people on how I would go about starting to get an idea on java and learning to program your own database :

--------------------
Have you done any programming before ?
Do you know Java or HTML or SQL ?

If not don't worry it isn't hard. Just takes a bit of dedication to learn the first bit then its easy.

If you are interested. Go to http://java.sun.com

Download the SDK for 1.4.2 as its the most commonly used java language.
Its available at : http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/download.html

Read the intstallation instructions for installing as they are fairly important.

Then run through the first few tutorials at :
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/index.html

Especially focus on Getting Started, Learning the Java Language, Essential Java Classes and Collections. Don't worry about Swing or Deployment .. they can come later if you want to learn them.

The first thing you should do is do a "Hello World" Program. The tutorials will show you how to do it. Its always nice to get the program printing something out.

If you have any questions send them my way. Once you have covered the above let me know and I will go through downloading from the web with you and also setting up the Database and how to put data into it.

My email address is aussiegreyhound @ yahoo com au

Thanks wesmip1,

I'll look into it, rankings into tables have been a bugbear of mine for quite sometime.

__________________
RaceCensus - powerful system testing software.
Now with over 413,000 Metropolitan, Provincial and Country races!
http://www.propun.com.au/horse_raci...ng_systems.html
*RaceCensus now updated to 31/01/2025
Video overview of RaceCensus here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W821YP_b0Pg

Hi CP!
I am sure it's only a matter of us, using different terminology, but would you please tell me what you mean by "rankings"?
Thanks

Iomaca,

Ranking by career prizemoney for example:
$1,000,000 1
$900,000 2
$750,000 3
$200,000 4
$100,000 5
etc

It can of course be done, but not easily enough for my liking and is cumbersome.
The problem is getting access to recognize the difference between two records, not between two fields.

I don't want to create a report with the info or even a query, I want to update tables, which is near impossible. Of course, I could perform a sort and then insert the ranking, but the program does not recognize a different race or venue or date as per previous / next record.

Ideally what is needed is a database that recognizes Excel formulae and can calculate between records.

At present I have a query within a query within a query, and it's getting very difficult to make changes or add queries when there are so many "layers"

__________________
RaceCensus - powerful system testing software.
Now with over 413,000 Metropolitan, Provincial and Country races!
http://www.propun.com.au/horse_raci...ng_systems.html
*RaceCensus now updated to 31/01/2025
Video overview of RaceCensus here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W821YP_b0Pg

OK I see what you mean.
It's just that you mentioned date-track-racenumber in your original post.
Creating a primary key based on these fields would be a basic prerequisite of designing a database table, I would have thought, thus keeping table integrity (elminating duplicate records etc.)
As for queries, at work we only use databases as a repository of data and all query work is done programmatically via VB, C++ etc. This makes writing applications portable, you only have to make a reference to the type of database you are using in code (like "mdb, dbs etc.") as a matter of fact even Excel can be referenced this way.
I have to agree with you re. Excel, it's very good what it was made for but a database it ain't. Still, if it does what you want it to do? why not use it?
Cheers

Chrome, I had the same type of problems trying to incorporate things like pace and ability rankings in my Access greyhound databases. It was beyond my programming abilities so in the end I was exporting all the form into Excel, doing all my rankings etc using array formula then reimporting into Access. Terribly inefficient and time consuming.

Another thing that initially bugged me was the inability to simply select the last n records of each ***/horse to produce a form guide. The 'top n records' function only produced the top records for the whole dataset, not for each individual runner. Of course I was able to eventually get around this problem with programming but didn't think it should have been necessary for something so simple and basic.

Wesmip, I have never looked at Oracle before and know nothing of Java but am reading this thread with some interest as I am presently trying to motivate myself to build a couple of new databases so that I can query data in ways that can't be done by the commercial dbs I am using. Thanks for your input. You just might motivate this tired old brain into trying something new.

Wunfluova

Wunfluova,

I find array formulae extremely slow and resource hungry amongst large amounts of data.

The way I do it is by sorting by A (Date) B (Track) C (Race Number) and of course the data I am trying to rank.

Then run a formulae such as :

=IF(A1&B1&C1<>A2&B2&C2,1,N1+1)

This gives you a ranking, but of course needs to be modified for dual top values, I usually use a second category such as ranking career prizemoney and the API, so the equal top ranking career prizemoney, priority goes to the horse with best API.

__________________
RaceCensus - powerful system testing software.
Now with over 413,000 Metropolitan, Provincial and Country races!
http://www.propun.com.au/horse_raci...ng_systems.html
*RaceCensus now updated to 31/01/2025
Video overview of RaceCensus here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W821YP_b0Pg

appreciated


yes



i appologise for this, i was given wrong information and not happy about that and stand corrected



i said it proved stable for me when set up right not refering anything diferent


you stated that it failed due to high volumes of data and was prone to corruption, yes you also provided some information to that, and i will not argue with that, what i can say is i run very large files ( and have for many years ) and they have not been corupted nor i doubt ever will be, as said i do not say excel is the worst or best option but can say if set up right there are no dramas and is a viable option for people to use.

'Open Office Org' [freeware project] supplies pretty much a copy of Excel [works with all Excel input]. This office package also has Calc, Spreadsheet, Draw, Impress, Math, Base and Word.

http://www.openoffice.org/