Fishing Marks Database??

[RobAdair]

This is an idea I\'ve been toying with for a while now and I\'m just wondering if it\'s feasible ? (if I ever find the time )

I run a lot of reports at work (which are saved as microsoft excel spreadsheets) through a microsoft access database to sort and extract certain pieces of information ie you can specify a particular product, date, test result etc and extract only that necessary piece of information.

My idea is to cobble together a similar type of access database which I could use to extract data from my excel worksheets of local fishing marks and catch reports. When perfected you would enter certain variables, tide, wind direction, date, time etc and it would produce a list of marks that have shown to be successful in these conditions. I realise it wouldn\'t be foolproof as there are too many variables, but it would give a shortlist of hopefully productive area\'s to choose from.

What you lads think? A bit of fun, a waste of time, a useful tool?

[jonny_mc]

stephen \"used\" to run a few year back a database for fishing if i remember rightly. He would have to date/time, conditions i.e tide state etc. . and what he caught, then he could refer to it later on.

[alan]

I\'ve started this topic before and normally falls on deaf ears,alot of people prefer to fish at mark X Y and sometimes Z and some even fish club matches at imaginary marks,if you get it off the ground Rob you\'ll get 100 % support off me mate

[TC]

Alan,
Check \"looking Good\" in the Admin area on ANE ref. \"deaf ears\"

[jonny_mc]

a no what you mean alan, the sites here to share information, a Herd of us arnt going to go to this mark X and overfish it and make the mark not fishable, a mean ha\'way!

[alan]

have\'nt got there yet,just doing the rounds

[mark]

it\'ll go one of 2 ways. there\'ll be \"fantastic idea\" or \"terrible Idea, don\'t ant to tell anyone where I fish\"

got a mySQL db built to do the same with boat marks, its got a several hundred in it now with lat/long details etc, its online, folks can enter new marks if the wish, search, get plots and even some charts.

some people hate the idea others have been completly open to and contributed heavily

I\'m all in favour and would gladly stick my meagre results in!

[RobAdair]

Cheers Alan . It would just be for personal use at first, but if it got off the ground I would willingly give anyone a copy of the program AND the marks and catch reports that I had up until that time. It might have a use for new anglers, giving them a fighting chance of catching, educating them AND keeping them interested in our sport.

That would be cool

[Stores]

We used to have a database on the old board. The biggest problem with it was that people could not fill it in correctly so you\'d end up with:
Mark Name: Rotten bottom

Species Caught: Last two hours of the ebb
and so on
Perhaps one of the problems we have is that there are those who have some knowledge of some marks, a few who have a lot of knowledge of a few marks, one or two with excellent knowledge of a lot of marks and the majority who know little about the marks but just enjoy fishing them, hence the few are reluctant to tell the many. It\'s different for me. I would put myself in the \"few with a lot of knowledge of a few marks\" but as I\'m 200 miles away and fish so infrequently I\'m happy to tell others where to fish. Mostly the culture is one of \"I know where will fish tomorrow, I can tell you why, how and how far out, but if I do you might catch my fish\"
Don\'t know how you get round that.

[alan]

The only probelm I have is people posting Bass fishing results and marks,this was even in the local paper the other week,really disapointed with the article

[alan]

you could have a secondary pass word for accessing this section on the forum,this would stop commercial fishermen looking in,its debatable whether they look in or not,are they really interested,they should know where the fish are anyway !

[alan]

Alan,
Check \"looking Good\" in the Admin area on ANE ref. \"deaf ears\"

I\'m away there now

[TC]

\"We used to have a database on the old board. The biggest problem with it was that people could not fill it in correctly so you\'d end up with:
Mark Name: Rotten bottom
Species Caught: Last two hours of the ebb and so on\"

Yes David, I remember that.
It also tended to have the odd \"catch report\" or 2 posted on it.

I think the problem with that aspect of it, was that it was never really looked after and the good, informative stuff wasn\'t sepparated from the errmmm....not so good and uninformative stuff.

A database is only as good as the information that goes into it: put crap in - and you get crap out. If it\'s a case of somebody putting the right info in the wrong box, then there needs to be somebody there to amend the entries so that the right info goes into the right box.

Having said that.......I don\'t have the necessary permissions to set up something like that on the current site layout. It would end up as another \"forum\" - not really what\'s needed for a \"database\".

[Oblickta]

I\'ve been working on a access database for a couple of months now inside a .exe (soon to be) app. written in VB 6.0. (Pro. ed) The db is set up and has three tables, shore, boat and freshwater. The trouble is, I don\'t know much SQL to kick it\'s ass with! And I keep getting sidetracked by adding games and other little eggs here and there. So far the app. is 2.53MB (on Disc), has 16 .frm\'s, 3 .cls and 8 .bas modules and gets bigger everytime I load it. Latest addition was an image viewer with fullscreen viewing and now toying with the idea of a animated splashscreen.

So who\'s the NESA SQL guru, is it you Rob?

[mark]

If you\'ve played with VB, SQL is a breeze, in fact there\'s loads of little freeware utilities on the web to take an excel doc and convertstraight to SQL,

Much better option IMHO than access and its evil VB hoards. Apart from anything else, support for mySQL is pretty much universal on the web, and like all good things is free, It also will out perform access many many time ssover if you get a big db and lots of clients wnating into it at a time (EBAY is built using mySQL tables)

if you go down the SQL avenue don\'t be fooled by microsoft SQL (mSQL or microsoft Sequel as its sometimes know) Its not as good and doesn\'t work the same

How big is it? I\'ve got an Asset management site I run for Kelloggs, every piece of artwork and photograph from Kelloggs UK in the last 50 years catalogued on it - the mysql tables/data....a little under 1meg at present!