30th January 2017

Hi ,

Today is the first of a few articles outlining the process that I used to design and build my personal racing database. If you've ever considered building your own racing database then this is how you go about doing it!

What Do You Want To Use Your Database For?

Building your own database is a slow process. I'm not saying that to put you off, but it's important not expect anything to happen overnight.

The first thing to do is to plan your racing database. As with any database, the more time that you spend in the planning it then the less problems you'll run into later.

The first stage in the planning of your database is to determine what you want to use it for. This may seem like an obvious question, but it's a very serious consideration and one that you should give a considerable amount of time in thinking about.

It's very easy to have in mind what you may want to do with your database immediately, based on an idea that you may have at the moment and cannot complete with the current software you're using. But, I'm sure though that you don't want to spend hours of time developing a tool that 6 months after finishing is not capable of doing what you want it to, purely because you didn’t put the time into planning it at the beginning.

How you want to use your database is going to determine how you design it, what software you use to build it, how long it will take to build and how much it is going to cost. Below are some ideas of possible uses for your database:

• Basic system building using AND/IF/OR statements horses race data
• Calculating impact values
• Complex system building using AND/IF/OR statements on horses historical data
• Race trend analysis require in-depth historical queries into race types and their winners
• Complex system building using advanced statistical querying on horses historical data
• Complex system building using advanced statistical querying on both race and horse historical data
• Being able to plugin advanced data mining technology and other technology e.g. artificial intelligence
• Creating ratings
• Ability to connect to automated betting tools

Of course, you're not limited to wanting to use it for just one of the above processes; you may wish to use it for multiple ones or even all of them. I'm sure that you'll also have other ideas of how you want to use your data once it's in your database. With a racing database the sky is the limit.

Consideration must also be given to what elements of the data you want to access. For example, separating the given class of a race is quite simple but do you want to be able to separate between classifications and race conditions, if so in how much detail?

It's important to write everything down, you can always cross-out anything that you wish to change but having a visual representation of what it is you want to be able to achieve is very important.

If you don't write it down, then you will forget some of the most important parts which will cost you unnecessarily later on in the process when it's considerably more complicated to change things.

Best Wishes,

Michael Wilding