Sunday, March 17, 2019

Excelling at data Access

Well, it's been a bit. Since the last post, I've been doing a lot of thinking about music- my music collection specifically, and how to best quantify it. I had decided that I would use either Access or Excel for this project.  After much thought, and several trial-and-error tests, I came to the conclusion that the best solution for my particular application would be to use both.

Why? After all, it seems to be a bit counter-intuitive to create multiple copies of the same dataset and have it in several places. However, in terms of music, when quantifying, I not only mean artists and albums and similar facts (which belong in 42, my database), but I also want to create a sort of "Top 42" group of lists which will track usage, rather than ownership. In other words, Access will store data on each album- title, artist, format (CD, mp3, etc.), UPC (if applicable) and related inventory type data. The flat database (spreadsheets) will be used to store the usage data, such as number of plays, last play, plays per artist... and any other minutiae that pretty much only I would be interested in.

As for duplicated data, I expect there will only be two datasets that are duplicated- one will be the artist/album dataset, and the other will be the album/song dataset. The former will be my master list of albums, and the latter will be a list of those songs that are a part of a collection, compilation or soundtrack, or individual mp3's that were not part of an album when acquired.

I'm very much looking forward to the results of course, but before this grand Top 42 launches, I've got a great deal of data entry and design to do. The data entry is proceeding slowly but steadily, with twenty-one albums and their tracks. Track (song title) and total times still need to be added.

A corollary project is the cleaning of the music players on two computers. Over the years, several standards were partially applied to these databases, and as a result, the organization is... well, it isn't very organized. As these will be major sources of quantitative input for the Top 42 flat database, they need to be cleaned up, standardized and partially deduped.

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.

Tuesday, January 1, 2019

Data before year's end

I'm going to apologize right at the start- this is not a Christmas blog, nor is it a year-in-review blog. It's merely a near end-of-year blog about the state of my data.

So, what, exactly, does the author wish to communicate? Well, for starters, I ran into an interesting enigma in my data....

Long ago, I purchased some CD's that had sound effects. Today, the internet has made them fairly irrelevant. So, the not-so-big data question is this: do I include them in in my inventory, even though I may never use them? Honestly, even though this database IS at least in part intended for insurance purposes, I don't think I'll miss those two disks. How about videos? I have a DVD produced by the Chicago Tribune which commemorates 9/11. It was free with my newspaper subscription, and is probably irreplaceable. But- I'm guessing it's hardly collectible. So, that one will also NOT make the cut. Books- both physical and e-books... I'm nowhere NEAR starting on those, but I think you can see the trend.

Owning the data gives the DBA a huge advantage, as is shown in the previous paragraph. The problem, though, is that if you're a small-time operator (as I am), there's no one to fact-check, proofread or cover your (data) back. So, I'm hoping to correct at least one of these deficiencies in 2019, by enlisting someone else to do some of the data entry (we'll see how that goes!).


*****Happy New Year*****

Well, I want to publish this, so I may as well post a few New Year's thoughts. For starters, it's officially 2019 in my neck of the woods, so Happy New Year. I'm enjoying what is probably the best egg nog I've ever had (from Southern Comfort- but no alcohol in it) in a vintage 1960's vintage tumbler. The tumbler is tall and narrow, with dusty rose screening of different cities around the world- rather appropriate for New Year's Day, n'est-ce pas?

I don't follow many other blogs, but I do follow some blogging "experts" on twitter. I generally agree with the "experts"-  one of the secrets to blogging is frequency; the other is content. If you've been following this blog for any length of  time, firstly, thank you. And secondly, thank you for putting up with my subject matter- I'm hoping that this is a reflection on YOUR eclectic reading tastes.

And FINALLY, the state of the database, December 31. 2018. As of the last entries, the music database stands thusly:

Number of groups: 156
Number of albums: 79
Number of songs: 1035

And that is all for 2018. I wish every reader a peaceful, joyous and profitable 2019.

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data management and and analysis so you don't have to.