Quote:
Originally Posted by o_crunk
I have been developing off the RDS system for over 10 years now. It's a totally fine system and I'd guess the initial developers of it some 25+ years ago had both the domain knowledge and deep knowledge of how to build a robust relational database system.
The changes made to it since then all seem to be driven by those with specific domain knowledge about racing and absolutely no respect for how relational database systems should work. It is very frustrating since developing off of these systems is not cheap - both from the perspective of the cost of acquiring the data and building the racing knowledge to do so. You might be a black belt SQL slicer and dicer but if you have no racing knowledge, you are hopeless.
I would point out the FP/FAN debacle occurred right in the middle of the meet. The specific geographical location for the races themselves did not change of course. The O course type is one of the few structural errors the initial developers made - surface vs course type. There was no way to know in 1991 that there would be other "main track" type "surfaces" that were not dirt at that time. The decisions made since then have all been Frankenstein'd onto the structure itself and never actually corrected at the schema level structure. Again, very frustrating that something this important is not driven by someone at Equibase who has both deep knowledge of relational systems *and* racing knowledge. It's always seemed very blase to me to make changes like this without considering the broader ramifications for the relational systems that power all the horse racing data products in the US.
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It's wonderful you have a clue about the pain-points because their aren't many of 'us' 3rd party folks around. I developed off of this because the charts are my primary source data:
https://info.trackmaster.com/thoroug...bonlycomma.txt
As you can see there's still no 'outer' noted here and how long has it been?
Ellis (Starr) there's one change you can crack the whip on @ TM
SURFACE
D D-Dirt
E D-Equitrack
F D-Dirt training
N D-Inner track
B T-Timber
C T-Downhill turf course
G T-Turf training
I T-Inner turf
J T-Jump race
M T-Hurdle
S T-Steeplechase
T T-Turf
U T-Hunt on turf
V T-Hunt Flat (Weatherbys only)
