I've had the chance in the last few years to work in collaboration with biodiversity professionals, and from my IT-oriented perspective there's often a lack of knowledge about how to efficiently organise / structure the data in a relational database systems. To be more precise: there's generally enough knowledge to make something "that works", but a better structured database would be much more future-proof (less data errors, easier to reuse the data in other contexts such as data publication, web portals, ...)
That tutorial would not cover SQL nor the technicalities of a given database engine (SQLite, PostgreSQL, ...), but rather help answering questions such as
- should a given piece of information be placed in a new field or in a new table?
- how should I link tables X, Y and Z so they can be queried to answer a wide range of questions?
- what constraint can I configure early when I create a database so human errors (i.e. typos when entering data) are detected as early as possible (and the database doesn't get messier when it gets more used/bigger)
Is there any demand for this from scientists, or is it just me?
If so, I'd be happy to help contributing to a tutorial (but I think it can be a pretty large task, so I'd like to have an idea of the interest first).
I've had the chance in the last few years to work in collaboration with biodiversity professionals, and from my IT-oriented perspective there's often a lack of knowledge about how to efficiently organise / structure the data in a relational database systems. To be more precise: there's generally enough knowledge to make something "that works", but a better structured database would be much more future-proof (less data errors, easier to reuse the data in other contexts such as data publication, web portals, ...)
That tutorial would not cover SQL nor the technicalities of a given database engine (SQLite, PostgreSQL, ...), but rather help answering questions such as
Is there any demand for this from scientists, or is it just me?
If so, I'd be happy to help contributing to a tutorial (but I think it can be a pretty large task, so I'd like to have an idea of the interest first).