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Database Help
| So where are all the numbers coming from ? | |
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The European Dragracing Database was started and maintained through many years by Tommy Nilsson from Denmark, and he did a great job in posting all the results he could get his hands on. Since September 2002
the database has been handed to me, and the first thing I realized was that there was a need to redisign the database infrastructure behind all the results you see on the site. So, I started to retrieve all the results (some 15,600 elimination and 9,800 Qualifying lines) into the new database structure I had built. You have to understand one thing about computers and informatics; you will never foresee every exception possible! This means that while transferring the data, some things may have gone wrong... For example, since before there was no seperate Drivers list in the database, the driver's name was repeated in each elimination or qualifying line. If a typing error was made in one of the lines, the code that did the transfer from the old database to the new one did not recognize the name with the error as the same driver, and made a new driver from it. That is why you will see some drivers listed twice, but with a different spelling in the name. If this is the case for you, please let me know so that I can rectify the problem. It is impossible for me to sort through more than 2,000 Drivers to get all the doubles and spelling errors out... The same problem occured with the cars, they used to be repeated on each line, because there was no car list in the database. Again, while transferring, some cars that are actually the same cars have been booked as different, and that is why you could see the same car listed twice in your driver's page, only because it was spelled differently. This brings me to the next section... |
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| How does that Database work ? | |
A database actually holds a number of Tables in which you can store lines of information, and you can link that information between tables. So, I have a table with all the drivers and a table with all the vehicles, and I linked those 2 tables
so that I know which vehicle belongs to which driver. The crucial thing in a raceresult is the vehicle, not the driver (I mean computerwise, not in real life). A race is run by a car, the driver just drives it. So what happens when I put down a result in the Eliminations table of the database? Schematically it goes something like this :
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| What does this all mean for the Drivers Pages and Records ? | |
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So what happens when you click on your own drivers page? The code will first go to the drivers table and retrieve all the information it has stored on the driver itself. Next, the code will lookup all the vehicles in the vehicles table that belong to this driver, and for each of the vehicles it finds, it will look through all the thousands of results to find the quickest times that car made on the 1/8 and 1/4 mile, and the best speeds on the 1/8 and 1/4 mile. For Super Comp, Super Gas and Super Street I have not included best ET and Speed, because they are fixed indexes you are not allowed to run under. If people would like to have them anyway, it can be arranged, just ask... So these results on your driver's page are actually your personal bests, displayed per vehicle. You can easily understand that by keeping the information in this way, I will be able to provide you with statistics and graphics of your performance through the years, but everything in it's own time, I still have heaps of work before I can think about implementing that. The Personal Best section still runs on the old database, but actually it should display the same results as in your Driver's pages when I will have reworked it, because it will look up the best results in the database for every person, and order it by Class. |
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| !! So this is Really Important !! | |
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As you see, all the results we have talked about so far (we will get to the Records soon) are retrieved from the database results! That means that if you think you drove a new personal best but I have no results that came in for that race, there is NO WAY I can update the database to reflect that new personal best.
What's more, I normally don't have to update any of those personal bests, because the database does it automatically, it will always select the best times it finds. So it is actually no use to mail me with a new personal best, cause if it happened on an official race, it will automatically show on the site after I imported the results into it. |
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| The European Records are another story alltogether... | |
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The European Records are not retrieved from the database, cause it would get a little complicated. Finding the fastest time wouldn't be such a problem, but every record needs to be backed up by a run that has to be in a 1% limit from the record, and that is not so easy to check, and would be time consuming.
The records page would take too long to load. I rather keep that page in my hands and go over the numbers myself. So, if you think you have driven yourself to a new record, just drop me a note on my email address and I will look into it. |
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One last thing, if you have ANY questions about this site, please send me a mail : erwin@eurodrag.com Erwin |
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