Shared database / common format?

[Foosinho]

I'm not really looking to put Elias out of business, but have any of you guys come up with a common format (XML?) for data sharing, and is all of the data out there available in a database format - or an easily imported database format?

I ask because those of us interested in looking at this stuff could save tons of duplicated effort if we could come up with a way to share this stuff. One of the reasons I stopped doing my old "US Pro soccer power rankings" is the sheer time it took to input results. It was even worse when I ran a fantasy MLS league, and had to input lineups and the sort.

I have web space with database and Perl/Python/PHP support on my personal server, and would be willing to provide hosting - at least for the low bandwidth traffic this forum would generate - for some kind of common datastore. Any thoughts?

[ChrisE]

Originally posted by Foosinho
I'm not really looking to put Elias out of business, but have any of you guys come up with a common format (XML?) for data sharing, and is all of the data out there available in a database format - or an easily imported database format?

I ask because those of us interested in looking at this stuff could save tons of duplicated effort if we could come up with a way to share this stuff. One of the reasons I stopped doing my old "US Pro soccer power rankings" is the sheer time it took to input results. It was even worse when I ran a fantasy MLS league, and had to input lineups and the sort.

I have web space with database and Perl/Python/PHP support on my personal server, and would be willing to provide hosting - at least for the low bandwidth traffic this forum would generate - for some kind of common datastore. Any thoughts?

I've got a good deal of information, but it's all in excel. I don't really know anything about computers, but I'd be willing to share it.

[Foosinho]

It's usually not too difficult to move things from Excel to a database and back - it's just more robust in a database. And I think I could make a web program spit out Excel files for query results (I _know_ I could generate a text format that would be easy to import into Excel - I write software that does that to pay the bills).

I think I can reuse my old Access data structure for table design - at least for game tracking. But I'm not sure how to store other data, and at what granularity. And I probably don't want to be responsible for maintaining the datastore - keeping it up to date, I mean. Tracking 5 MLS games a week or so isn't too bad, even if you have to input rosters, goalscorers, substitutions, etc. It becomes overwhelming when you start tracking the A-League and PDL...

[Karl K]

Foos, I did all the Player Performance Charting stuff in Access...the tracking was done in Excel, and then imported in, because that's what I know.

I actually spent a couple hundred dollars on an Acess programmer to slick it up.

I was thinking that all of this stuff could go into MySQL and reports could be served up by some Perl script.

But that's way outside my league.

[Foosinho]

Originally posted by Karl Keller
Foos, I did all the Player Performance Charting stuff in Access...the tracking was done in Excel, and then imported in, because that's what I know.

A common approach. Here at work, we have easy access to, uh, Access, so we import text data logs, and output the queries into Excel (since that's what our statistical software needs). Before I got here the Human Factors engineers did the data sorting and prep by hand. How barbaric. ;)

I actually spent a couple hundred dollars on an Acess programmer to slick it up.

I applaud your dedication. Should've hired me! :)

I was thinking that all of this stuff could go into MySQL and reports could be served up by some Perl script.

But that's way outside my league.

Not mine. It's much easier to share (and scale up) if it's in MySQL. I wanted to use MySQL and PHP (but Perl is just as easy) for my system.

If you would be interested in moving this system online, I'd be interested in investigating further to see if I can be of any help. Of course, you've spent a lot of time, effort, and money on your system, so it's your call. You could email me a copy of the db and a sample Excel file or two ( brian at guilfoos dot com ) and I'd be willing to take a look. Of course, the distribution scope of the table structure and interface code is totally in your court. We could move it to a web-based system and still keep the internals closed.