Using Access to manage experimental data

[Guest]

I am trying to redo our experimental data processing procedure and thought a
database would work better than the manual methods that are currently used.
I have experience programming in other languages (Java, C++, MatLab), but
haven't used VBA or Access macros.

What the database would contain:

several hundred individual datasets
each datasets would contain individual test parameters and 4 arrays of test
data
the test data would be (on average) 30x20 numerical matrices

What the database would need to do (ideally; some of these requirements are
flexible):

read in a delimited text files with all of the data for each run (output
from the data acquisition program)
index the datasets by the individual run number
perform simple calculations on the test data and store the computed data
allow the user to sort the data by a particular test parameter and output a
subset of the data to an Excel spreadsheet for plotting.

Is Access even capable of doing any of these things? If so, what would be
the most efficient means of setting up the database.

Thanks a lot for your input!
-Engineer_Eventer

 

[John W. Vinson]

I am trying to redo our experimental data processing procedure and thought a
database would work better than the manual methods that are currently used.
I have experience programming in other languages (Java, C++, MatLab), but
haven't used VBA or Access macros.

What the database would contain:

several hundred individual datasets
each datasets would contain individual test parameters and 4 arrays of test
data
the test data would be (on average) 30x20 numerical matrices

What the database would need to do (ideally; some of these requirements are
flexible):

read in a delimited text files with all of the data for each run (output
from the data acquisition program)
index the datasets by the individual run number
perform simple calculations on the test data and store the computed data
allow the user to sort the data by a particular test parameter and output a
subset of the data to an Excel spreadsheet for plotting.

Is Access even capable of doing any of these things? If so, what would be
the most efficient means of setting up the database.

Thanks a lot for your input!
-Engineer_Eventer

Access is quite capable of doing this. The matrixes would need to be stored in
normalized tables, but that's an implementation detail.

However... it's going to be a big, complicated app. Access has a steep
learning curve (and for people with lots of Excel and procedural-programming
language experience, and equally steep UNlearning curve), even for simpler
apps. Don't expect this to get done in a week or two. Coming up with
normalized tables will be the first step (e.g. rather than several hundred
tables each with a "dataset", you'll surely have two or three tall-thin tables
with all of the data, with a dataset identifier field); getting the rest of
the tables defined will take some work, then you'll need VBA code to manage
the imports, Queries to do the calculation, Forms to edit and review the data,
and more code to export it to Excel.

John W. Vinson [MVP]