Dear Biomart, I have been investigating the use of Biomart with our database (http://www.eurepxress.org), following on from a recently departed colleague (Chuang-Kee Ong, who some of you may have dealt with recently). and I have a couple of questions:
1. Once a Mart has been created, how do you refresh the contents of the Mart if the database on which it is based changes? Our database grows daily with new data, and without some procedures or processes, preferably non-manual, put in place, the Mart will almost immediately become inconsistent with our base data. I can see how to do this with the tools supplied but only manually. Also I don't really want to start building something myself, as it occurred to me that this must have been an issue before with other Marts, and that there might be a pre-existing solution to refreshing Marts already. Have you come across this issue before, and if so, can you suggest a solution please? 2. Documentation. I can't find anywhere in the documentation any explanation of how to go about implementing Importables and Exportable fields. Our data has a number of potential linking fields and we would like to implement these links when we put our Mart live. Do you have a document that explains this in more detail please (I have been looking at a document called "Biomart 0.6 Documentation" so far)? (A minor documentation issue: when configuring a Mart, the Perl script configure.pl has to be run. I'm still not sure of the difference between the "Y" and "N" options that I'm presented with when this script runs, even after looking at the documentation. So I run the script twice! Can you explain what is going on here please?) Many thanks for your time. Yours Mike Wicks
