Environmental database design

Question

Hi everyone,

I've never designed a database before, but I've had experience programming in a few languages and assembler throughout college, as well as some web design, so I'm able to at least pick up what I need to know if I can be pointed in the right direction. One of the tasks of my job is to sort through some data that we've been collecting in the field, using a "sonde" which measures temperature, pH, conductivity, and other parameters. The device sits in a stream 24/7 (except for when we take it out and switch it with our other sonde every couple weeks, so that we can put in a newly calibrated one in the stream and retrieve the data from the one that was in the field). It collects data every 15 minutes or so, and has done so since 2007. Currently, all of our data is spread across multiple excel spreadsheets, and we have additional data from a weather station and another instrument that all gets compiled into quarterly documents. My goal is to design as simple of a database as possible with most of the functionality of a database like this: http://hudson.dl.stevens-tech.edu/hrecos/d/index.shtml. Ours would be significantly simpler as it is not live data (but would instead retrieve data from files that we upload once we'd finished handling the formatting and compilation of all our data). I would very much like the graphing ability on the site that the above database has, but I at least need to be able to select a range of data and select as many variables as I want within that time range and then be able to download a spreadsheet with the generated data (or at least a CSV file).

I realize this is a tough task, and as I have not designed a database before, I suspect it is very much an uphill task. However if I would be able to learn the things necessary to do this, and make it web-accessible, that would be a huge accomplishment and very much impress my boss. Any advice or tips to go off in the right direction would be very much appreciated.

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

Hi,

By Googling "database design tutorial", I found those interesting resources :

http://www.tutorialized.com/view/tutorial/Introduction-to-database-design/39191

http://www.tekstenuitleg.net/en/articles/software/database-design-tutorial/intro.html

Answer 2

There are actually 2 parts to the solution you're looking for:

• The database, which will store your data in a single organized place, and
• The application, which is the interface used by people to interact with the database.

Basically, a database by itself is just a container. You need some kind of application which accept criteria from a user, pull the appropriate data meeting the criteria from the database, and display it to the user in a meaningful fashion - in this case, a graph or a spreadsheet.

Normally for web-based apps the database and application are two separate components. However, for a small app with a fairly small number of users, and especially for someone just starting out, you may want to consider an all-in-one solution like InfoDome, sort of like MSAccess for the web.

Either way, you're still going to need to learn about database design. There's many good tutorials out there, just do some searching. DatabaseAnswers.org has been useful for me. They have a set of tutorials as well as a large collection of sample database schemas.