I'm don't want something for nothing.

1. I would like the forums thoughts on the best data to keep in a database.

2. What program would be best to use, e.g Excel, Access etc.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Zlotti

1. I would like the forums thoughts on the best data to keep in a database.

2. What program would be best to use, e.g Excel, Access etc.

Zlotti[/QUOTE]
Hi!
Depends what you want to do? Do you want to keep a lot of past data to analyse later, or just download the daily races and work on them?
If the latter, then Excel will do fine.
If you want to keep your past data and still use Excel, you must realise that the larger the file the slower Excel will be, with some complex calculations performed on a large amount of data it can actually take a few minutes!!!
On the other hand Access is not easy to use but it's a great database to keep your data in, and it is fast.

Solution one:Keep your data in Access tables, or just simply in a separate folder as .xls files, and use Excel to query them.

Solution two: Keep your data in Access tables and use an external programming language (VB, C++, etc.). to query it.

I myself do this, but I do programming for a living anyway, but I think Excel is just fine for everyday use, after all I know quite a few people who don't even have a computer and doing a lot better on the punt then I ever will!?.

Iomaca's exactly right, it depends what you want to do with the database.
I'm a database programmer so I have a dedicated database programming setup to work with and I keep everything (datawise) I can get my hands on - even if I don't need it right now.
The simple answer I would think is keep whatever data you would use if you were working a manual system and you'll soon find out what else it would be nice to have. Then you can expand.

KV

Thankyou Gentlemen

It is as I thought, Access would be better than Excel. Which means.... not being a programmer I will have to stick to sorting the wheat from the chaff on these forums.

Hi Zlotti,

Like you I'm not a programmer. But developing systems, as well as running general queries, is great fun. Assuming you buy your data from Cyberhorse, I reckon Bet Selector is the best tool for the job.

Monkeyinjapan

Hi Zlotti,

Excel is not a database, it is a spreadsheet.

To have a database, you need to have seperate tables with relationships.

For everyday rating of races or reporting Excel is fine.
To store large amounts of data, Excel is limted, slow and clumbsy.
I'm talking about 40,000 records per sheet.

Access is a very good database with many programming features, but it is very intense and hard to learn if you don't want to dedicate months to learning it. It's taken me years to become an intermediate user of Access, and I've been helped along the way. I still don't know VBA code, but use snippets of code supplied to me from various generous souls.

I would say that it's really more difficult than it needs to be to set up queries that lookup large chunks of data with many criteria.

Also I'm extremely annoyed at the 2GB database limit still in Access 2003.
Another annoyance, is the fact that you need to regularly compact the database, which takes quite some time, as it grows in size just by use, rather than adding records. If you have a large database, it will crash if you don't compact it regularly if it's near 2GB.

Filemaker Pro is quite easy to learn and very easy to create queries.
Very user friendly, and very logical (not difficult to follow the logic of it).

Alpha 5 is another database which is quite easy to learn if you put the time in.

In summary and in my opinion only.....

I use Access and Filemaker.

I use Access to code auto importing of data (Filemaker can't do this).
Then I transfer the data in the tables to Filemaker and do all my queries and calculations in Filemaker.

This is the best option for me.

For a new person I would suggest inputting your data to Excel first, then importing that data into Filemaker and doing your searches from there.
More new user friendly.

__________________
RaceCensus - powerful system testing software.
Now with over 399,000 Metropolitan, Provincial and Country races!
http://www.propun.com.au/horse_raci...ng_systems.html
*RaceCensus now updated to 31/03/2024
Video overview of RaceCensus here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W821YP_b0Pg

zlotti, well worth the time&effort to learn even the basics of VBA.