solutions wanted Lots of data to search, mine, and view

[ArthurMike]

My problem is pretty basic I believe but I'd like to get a quote from someone to do this for me. I currently access and store data in a variety of manners including Excel, comma delimited text documents, and even a rudimentary FM8.5 DB. I THINK I want it all in FM and in a manner that will allow me to ultimately do some data mining as time progresses. Need some help in designing the file structure and/or relationships - I can make stuff like Excel and FM work, I just don't do it elegantly or even intelligently...

Every day I add data in ten to twelve well defined text and numeric fields describing "stuff" about my universe of 3000 objects. I know it's wasteful (for example) to enter the date on each of the 3000 objects each day, but I can't figure out how else to indetify and differentiate todays data from yesterdays so I can analyze time series, other than create a table for each day.

Any suggestions or quotes or emails will be greatfully answered

[David McQueen]

If I am reading this correctly, you are adding fields each day for the date and say a comment for some of the objects. If this is true, you are busy building yourself a nightmare.

A. In terms of structure of the database needed, it is probably pretty simple:

1. Table of objects

2. Table of comments with a comment and a date field as the basic fields and a key field linking it back to a specific object.

B. The interface should allow you to

1. Add a new object

2. Add a new comment and attach it to an object

3. Automatically add the date of the comment

C. The reports could be anything from simple to extremely complicated. We do not really know what you are doing.

D. You say you are collecting data in a variety of formats. The question you should ask is are you collecting the same data all the time? To use a database effectively the data collected must be standardized in some form.

E. Once something is built, you would have to get the data in. This is where the "building a Nightmare" comment comes in. You are looking for normalized data - each piece of data is entered once and only once and similar pieces of data are kept in separate records.

Example is comments. Each comment record would have one piece of data for the comment and one piece of data for the date. Each comment would have a separate record so that the date field and the comment field are only created in the program once.

It appears above that on one record you may be adding a date field and say a comment for each object as time goes on. This becomes very difficult to migrate into a program as standard imports will not work.

With what you have given it would be pretty hard to give you a quote on this.The function of this post is more to help you get a handle on what it is you are doing and give you some sort of idea on what is required to tame it.

Hope this helps

Dave McQueen