using Greyhound Racing Data

[richardthelionheart]

My plan is to create a data base with about 20000 records of greyhounds - their age, lists of various 'runs' (in races) , the trainer, the breeding etc etc. Setting up this data base should not be a problem as I am familiar with form guides over the last 20 years. My question is -How do they (the form guide distributors) given that they have a list virtually every day of about 500 greys that need to be sorted into 10 races per meeting and all the accompanying form, do that? I would like to know about the process of extracting this specific data every day. It is a mystery to me. My excel expertise would be novice level. I would be very grateful to anyone who can point me in the right direction. I am prepared to work hard. I understand that I will need to extend my knowledge dramatically.

 

[etaf]

i know nothing about racing or formguides

i suspect they have structured database with various bits of code running on database specific software , like SQL etc
As i did when in work and using databases for large corporations

sometimes a small database would be written in MSAccess - but that was often against policy, i setup quite a few in the 90's and had IT incorporate them into the main SQL database - which was for all europe, middleeast and africa.

20,000 records

You would need to setup the data in such a way, that it makes it easy to extract the info you need, I would suggest you do NOT use 1 row per dog - but maybe 1 row per event
that would have a lot of duplication in it
or maybe 2 tables - 1 with the dog info and then 1 with the race info

can you give us a sample of what you want to extract and see ??

 

[richardthelionheart]

I know nothing about SQL, but I am grateful for your interest, etaf. Obviously from the example uploaded each of the 5 runs for each dog would need to be saved having been tagged with the name of the appropriate dog. So in the future I would have only the names of the dogs running on a particular day. I would then have to search for the records of only those dogs at that time. I would have no idea as to how to match the runners with their past runs.

 

[etaf]

sorry, I have no idea how you would get that information into a spreadsheet or reproduce it, as i have no idea what any of the values mean , or how they are derived - maybe a full explanation of exactly what information you want to display, how you have stored in your 20,000 records
a member here may have a solution for you, i dont know