Best laid plans...

Well, that didn't get far.

It looks like there's a small problem in the F1 Sweepstake schema - and I'm unsure at the moment just how much of a pain it will be. At the heart of the problem is that I've decided to partition the data on a season basis, therefore at the "top" of the tree is a season table which holds little more than a year number and a flag for the "current season". Everything which is an actual instance of something (e.g. race, result) refers to it by season, but also may refer to more "static" information (e.g. a race is at a circuit - but the circuit crosses seasons, or a result was for a seat which had a driver - but the driver may have been in more than one season).

All very well and good, except I didn't really link the competitor (those participating in the sweepstake) in the same way, or even really think about it - thus while you can easily join from the "formula 1 season" data into the "sweepstake data", via the natural identity links and season partitioning, you cannot so easily go the other way around. Which, will, err, kinda be required for managing the competitors - d'oh!

OK, so I can just slap the season partitioning on the tables linking the competitor's choices to the rest of the app and hopefully all will be well... maybe. Something is bugging me about the EDM editor where it keeps picking up a weird reference into one table, but not a similar reference into another "logically identical" table - now that was partly caused by a missing FK reference, but it kept coming back long after the reference was instated.

Then again, maybe I'm just being slightly paranoid (as schema changes can be expensive and painful), and that I can't quite think of the best way to do it at the moment.

Need to have a ponder, and tinker around with it.

Development Activities

One of the key things I'd like to use this blog for is as a record for my weekend hobbiest dev work. I'll try and keep my professional stuff out of this, as it's mostly irrelevant.

I currently have 3 projects "on the go", 2 of which have specific annual deadlines to achieve, and the other I expect to rattle on for the rest of the year.

1. F1 Sweepstake - this has grown from a spreadsheet I threw together to track Retro's F1 Sweepstake, into a database, into a website. Next revision, due by end of Feb, is to move to a new (and actually complete without bodges) data model (done), host on MS Azure (in progress), connect through ADO.NET Entity Framework (done) and use ASP.NET MVC (in progress) to front-end with some ExtJS goodness thrown in for sprinkles.
   
2. Beavervision Scoreboard - ancient DB and what started as a Classic ASP website for our annual Eurovision party. Has been pushed within an inch of it's life. Last year I transformed it to use ExtJS and ASP.NET Web Services, it mostly worked but there were some complaints of lagginess on the dropdowns - mostly from people who have been described as "non-technical" mind.
   
3. Home Finance Package - to do. I want to replace a collection of spreadsheets which require much manual labour with "something" - probably a DB and something on MS Azure, perhaps. We'll see.

I think it's important to maintain a healthy mixture between OO and DB dev - there seems to be a "developer divide" between the 2 areas, many OO people produce the oddest SQL I've ever come across (and visa-versa), but ultimately won't the best solution come from utilising both correctly?

Or, paying someone else to do it.

Something new...

I've never been much of a diary keeper, if at all. But I'd like to start keeping a record of things I've been doing, my random stream of thoughts and general day-to-day musings. I'm sure little will entertain or be amusing, but it might help me piece together something in the future, perhaps.