Comments on: Survey Analysis Service

By: Felipe

Felipe — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 09:27:51 +0000

I began working on this tool, too.
John, I first used your data but the employee field seems to have a problem. So I parsed it again, but nevertheless the data you provided were of a great help to begin faster and the tables structures were a good reference.
No form or user input yet: the HTML/CSS tables and graphs are generated from a PHP array of strings written prior to execution of the script but I’m working on it for next week.

By: John

John — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 14:06:29 +0000

Don’t have time to create an app, but here’s some SQL if you’d like it.

http://www.johndavidanderson.net/blog/2007/10/23/ala-2007-web-design-survey-in-sql/

By: John

John — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 14:49:59 +0000

@Jeff

Right – I have no problem putting it in something – my comments were more directed to the setup at Dabble DB.

Well, that and I wouldn’t touch .NET/SQLServer with a 32′ long pole. :)

I’ll keep tinkering today to see what I can come up with.

By: Abdelrahman Osama

Abdelrahman Osama — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 11:38:25 +0000

Thanks Bob, I'm using dabble db to create analysis data for Middle Eastern respondents which are 0.6% of respondents it's delicious, I'm still working to create more views. And will post on my blog when I'm done.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 10:36:14 +0000

@John,
Well, depending on the size of the database, if it would fit into a SQL Express 2005 DB which I believe has a 4GB size limit then anyone with any of the free Microsoft ASP.NET development tools could try working out a solution at home and as a means of learning the software. Otherwise if you have all the SQL Scripts to generate a MySql4 database this could still work out as well..

You know what they say “normalize your data till it hurts, and denormalize until it makes sense!”

By: Jeff

Jeff — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 10:35:05 +0000

@John,
Well, depending on the size of the database, if it would fit into a SQL Express 2005 DB which I believe has a 4GB size limit then anyone with any of the free Microsoft ASP.NET development tools could try working out a solution. Otherwise if you have all the SQL Scripts to generate a MySql4 dtabase this could still work out as well..

You know what they say “normalize your data till it hurts, and denormalize until it makes sense!”

By: John

John — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 20:46:48 +0000

@Bob:

I’ve got over a million rows I’d need to import. I don’t think that’s going to work.

My approach is a bit different than David Carringtons (and others?) because I’ve normalized it a bit – rather than leaving everyones skills in a single field, I’ve broken it out into another table (same with perks, etc).

Not sure if I should just post the DB somewhere, or build a simple app to view it. :/

By: Karl

Karl — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 20:43:45 +0000

I want the dataset in a SQL file is that possible?

By: Steph Gray

Steph Gray — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 20:34:52 +0000

Now this isn't the tool for a 30,000+ response survey, but for smaller datasets, you might consider my lightweight survey tool AskPeople. It's a PHP download, flat-file based, with pretty much pure CSS templates and fairly clean XHTML code, and comes with a built in reporting module to look at results of one question crossed by another. Sorry for the shameless plug, but someone here might find it useful!

By: David Carrington

David Carrington — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 20:01:54 +0000

When I was attempting to make graphs of UK-only data during my lunch hour the other day, a colleague suggested that I could put the database online and let people choose a country to run queries against.

I’d have a go but I’d be worried for my poor little shared hosting server. I’ve imported the CSV data to MySQL (mostly as ENUM fields) and a project like this isn’t too far out of reach to anyone that wanted to try and ticked the “back end” skill on the survey.

I’d be happy to trade ideas with anyone else attempting to tackle this.

By: Bob Monsour

Bob Monsour — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 19:50:47 +0000

John, you can do more, but have to do it a piece at a time. That’s what they told me in the chat. They also seemed intrigued with the idea of setting it up under their commons area, where anyone can see/use it.

Regards,
-Bob

By: John

John — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 19:11:03 +0000

I have a database created, but Dabble only supports 15,000 rows or less for a dataset. I can’t host it there. :(

By: Bob Monsour

Bob Monsour — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 18:44:12 +0000

Lastly, check out http://www.dabbledb.com/commons/

You can create a “commons” database for sharing. The database has the same features as the main Dabble product.

By: Bob Monsour

Bob Monsour — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 18:41:27 +0000

Check out… http://www.dabbledb.com/chat/

They just responded with…”maybe we’ll set up a commons database and invite eric :)”

This is wierd, I’m in a chat on a site and posting comments about the chat. What planet is this?

Regards,
-Bob

By: Bob Monsour

Bob Monsour — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 18:40:14 +0000

Guys, this is a perfect fit for DabbleDB. It's mean to allow anyone to do this sort of multi-variable pivot table. See dabbledb.com. I just went to their site, started a chat and suggested that they take this on as a public service. Regards, -Bob