[thelist] Alternate sources of storing data?

[Luther, Ron]

Tom Dell'Aringa asked about a speedskating club site:

>>I'm working on a redsign [?] of our speedskating club site. 
>>The new site will have a page for each member listing a 
>>short bio and any top 10 finishes in races. 

>>It seems like a lot of work to build a database interface for
something this simple. 


Hi Tom,


As other folks have already pointed out, you may want to reconsider
using a db.

A while back, (closing on 10 years now I guess), I "consulted" on the
backend design for a local swimclub site. 

(Frozen water, warm water, it's all good, right?)  

Maybe the fin-folks were more 'competition oriented' than your sk8r
crowd (I doubt it) but the parents were very interested in being able to
pull up their kid's individual best time by event, whether in a meet or
in practice, over a given time period, the average winning time for all
swimmers by gender by age class so far this season, meet records by
meet, best times by team, ranking by age, best time by event for the
month, etc. etc. etc. ... 

All kinds of things that are easy-peasy to do with dynamic SQL - as long
as you have the numbers in a db.

If you end up designing for that kind of thing, then the 'bio' piece is
a simple bit of add-on fluff.

Seeing how most dbs seem to have some kind of facility to allow admin
types to dump spreadsheets into tables I didn't see any need to build
any 'interface' for updating the db ... brute force seemed 'good
enough'; Get somebody to type the data into a spreadsheet, reformat it
(you always end up reformatting), load it and go.  It wasn't all that
elegant.  It just worked.


YMMV - Have Fun!
RonL.