Jan Cohen writes:
> Hi guys, sorry I've been away for a bit.
Jan, you might want to subscribe to [EMAIL PROTECTED],
I believe this incarnation of the list ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) is
about to go away.
> I've just more or less been handed one of those "hot corporate web
> projects" that will require some outsourcing. Basically, I'll be
> looking for someone to do a relational database that sort of breaks
> down as follows:
> approx. 80 products, each product having anywhere
> from 5 to 30 categories of specifications.
On a second reading, your sentence above is imprecise. What do
you mean by "category of specifications"? What do you mean by
"specification"? When you say 80 products, do you mean 80 individual
entries, or will each product have an entry? To illustrate:
If you have a set of products where each product consists of a
set of facts (measurements, costs, model numbers, etc - i.e. a
record), and each product has the same or roughly the same set but
different values in each column, then you can simply store them all in
the same table. Even if it seems like there's a wide variance between
the columns for each set, if there aren't that many products, you
might still use one table and just leave categories blank or
undefined, to simplify.
On the other hand, if you have categories of products, and each
product has entirely different types of facts, you might set up a
table for each product category.
Without a clearer idea of what the data looks like, it's
impossible to suggest in which direction a solution might best be
found.
> For practical purposes (given the specs. and some
> room to play with), let's say there are about 3000
> different specifications to work with.
As another poster suggested, if the data set is this small, you
might simply build or have built a custom perl script and skip the
database. I would not necessarily use an array of hashes - try using
DBD:CSV. This implements a comma-separated-values database that you
can use to prototype or for small data sets. Then you can easily
scale up to a real database if the product line grows.
> Based on maybe four of five different questions that
> the customer might ask, the database tool should
> be able to narrow down a response to maybe one or
> two different products that would suit the customer's
> needs (as well as links to product descriptions, of
> course).
> Here's where I ask that you bear with me:
> the products consist of motors, amplifiers that drive
> them, controllers that control the moving process,
> and cabling specific to the individual combinations.
> I know I'm being overly general here, but time is
> really short (I need to submit my own proposal by
> Friday, EOD, which includes a flash lead-in to the
> sample web pages our management group will be
> viewing on overhead).
> Work will entail the database (one that can be "relatively" easily
> updated offline),
Hopefully "relatively" means by a clueful person who can deal
with importing and exporting databases from a PC package, ftping them
around, etc.
I keep wanting to build a GUI client that will live on a PC and
let a point-n-click user edit a database and upload all the changes at
once. Maybe someday in the near future, I will. Frankly, the other
day as I was considering the problem from yet another angle, I decided
the simplest thing to do would be to set up a cheap (~$500) linux box
with a web server, database, perl, etc, and use it as a staging area,
rather than trying to essentially reproduce all of that on a winbox.
> and a front end for it (CF is a possibility). I will do the
> front-end page layout myself.
> P.S. If you would like an idea of what the current
> iteration of the proposed database should like, access
> Electro-craft's "Motion Wizard" at
> http://www.electro-craft.com/ec.cfm?p=004853.pi.mcpc .
Steven J. Owens
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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