for my current project, I'm building a survey builder from scratch (some of the requirements are very unique). I'm having quite a hard time with the data model since it seems overly normalized to me. I'd love some input on it (since I'm not the most experienced programmer).
The situation:
Most of the question types stand by themselves and don't have any relation to surrounding questions (e. g. "How do you like the weather?" - "Fine"). Other questions need a module that relates them with their surrounding questions (e. g. Likert scale questions -- How satisfied are you with: a.) your school? your workplace?).
Currently, my solution is to put every question in a module. This results in a lot of modules with just one question in them.
Here is a sketch explaining the problem:
The normalized data structure looks like this (I'm using SQL):
looks ok. you will also need a place for the actual responders, and another for the actual responses those responders give to the questions.
I'm evaluating 2sxc as a possible platform for implementing a knowledge management solution but we're in a bit of a rush. Our alternative is DNN Live Articles.
So far I really like the look of 2sxc, but I have questions regarding our possible use of it.
The main questions I have are around hierarchical lists like nested Categories and permissions.
From the look of some of the apps I've installed like FAQs with Categories but I can't find anything yet where they are nested. I tried creating a Content Type and adding fields where the first is the Category Name and the second is Parent Category. I created a new Content Type Field with a Data Type of Entity, but the only option for Input Type is default and Content Block Items. It works but when you create a new category the content that comes up in the Parent Category field covers just about everything - not sure I understand the concept behind this.
Then the second issue is permissions. Does this system somehow incorporate permissions because we'd like to lock down knowledge articles by category, but I haven't seen any implementations that showcase how one would do this.
Regarding #1 I don't understand your question, sorry :)
Regarding #2: there is no rule-based security, so you can't say "items with category X may be edited, but category Y may not"
BUT: you can easily implement this in your UI, if your main concern is user guidance and not "bad people with very good IT skills"
I've been given access to a cloud MongoDB (MongoLab) and need to extract some data into Excel so I can analyse it. The data isn't particularly complicated or large and is well suited to a 'normal' relational structure.
My research suggests things are trickier because the data has 'nested' aspects although conceptually its pretty clear how this would become a table. Here is what a document in the collection looks like, essntinaly the stuff highlighted blue would be columns in the table while the yellow would create a row for each "marketing_event" with the specifics of each event also being in a column:
Ideally I would use Power Query to get the data into Power Pivot but at this point anything will do!
I've tried a bunch of things all of which haven't got me much closer to end result that I'm looking for:
I downloaded MongoVue which I used to successfully connect to the database and while it enabled me to see the data in a basic table form, it does nothing with the nested stuff and the documentation is minimal in terms of how it could be of more use.
I also tried Pentaho PDI based on this article:http://sqlmag.com/blog/integrating-mongodb-and-open-source-data-stores-power-pivot but the steps aren't detailed and although I can see the collection, trying to replicate some sample queries I found on the web were totally unsuccesful.
I've tried to get a trial of Simba's ODBC connector but as yet the download doesn't seem to be working. I have contacted them but without response just yet.
I've even installed Mongo locally and tried to use the command prompt to connect which I was unable to do. Even if I pursued this I wouldn't be confident about knowing where to start in terms of creating the end product.
Happy to hear any suggestions or recommendations.
TIA
Jacob
Here's a solid ODBC driver that helps maintain the fidelity of your mongoDB data by exposing the nested MongoDB data model as a set of relational tables to Excel and other ODBC apps. in the sample document above, this driver will do exactly what you're looking for. The embedded documents and arrays can be extracted as separate related tables from the fields at the root level of the document.
https://www.progress.com/odbc/mongodb
I don't know if you already found the solution - but Simba ODBC is providing support for nested arrays.
Have a look here:
https://www.simba.com/resources/webinars/connect-tableau-big-data-source. This is an example how to connect Tableau BI to MongoDB. You might find it helpful.
And some more information on handling no-sql data in BI tools is provided in this whitepaper: http://info.mongodb.com/rs/mongodb/images/MongoDB_BI_Analytics.pdf
Recently I started working on a huge Rails 3.1 project that contains several SQL queries per controller action and uses the AR query DSL extensively and deliberately. Many of these queries are composed of nested where, join and merge clauses. Of course this all makes the app really slow at some parts and I wanna know which resources, books, blogs are there to help Railers deal with it?
I appreciate any recommendation on any relevant source.
Thank you.
I suggest you The Ruby Reflector / SQL ., btw take a look at this source.
I was searching the net for something like a wiki database, just like wikipedia but instead stores structured content, editable by users. What I was looking for was an online database accessible by everyone where people can design the schema and data with proper versioning of both schema and data. I couldn't find any such site. I am not sure if it is my search skills or if there really is no wiki database as of now. Does anyone out there know anything like this?
I think there is a great potential for something like this. A possible example will be a website with a GUI for querying a MySQL DB where any website visitor can create DB objects and populate data.
UPDATE: I had registered the domain wikidatabase.org to get started on a tool but I didn't find enough time yet. If anyone is interested in spending some time and coding on this, please let me know at wikidatabase.org
It's not quite what you're looking for, but Semantic Mediawiki adds database-like features to MediaWiki:
http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki
It's still fundamentally a Wiki, but you can add semantic tags to pages ([[foo::bar]] [[baz::1000]]) and then do database-type queries across them: SELECT baz FROM pages WHERE foo=bar would be {{#ask: [[foo::bar]] | ?baz}}. There is even an embryonic SPARQL implementation for pseudo-SQL queries.
OK this question is old, but Google led me here, so for anyone else out there looking for a wiki for structured data: Take a look at Foswiki.
This might be like what you're looking for: dbpedia.org. They're working on extracting data from Wikipedia, and encoding it in a structured format using RDF, so that it can be queried using SPARQL.
Linkeddata.org has a big list of RDF data sets.
Do you mean something like http://www.freebase.com?
You should check out https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page which is a bit different but still may be of interest.
Something that might come close to your requirements is Google Docs.
What's offered is document editing roughly similar to MS Word, and spreadsheets roughly similar to Excel. I'm thinking of the latter, of course.
In Google Docs, You can create spreadsheets for free; being spreadsheets, they naturally have a row-and-column structure similar to a database, and which you can define flexibly. You can also share these sheets with other people. This seems to be a by-invite-only process rather than open-to-all, but there may be other possibilities I'm not aware of, or that level of sharing might be enough for you in any case.
mindtouch should be able to do it. It's rather easy to get data in / out. (for example: it's trivial to aggregate all the IP's for servers into one table).
I pretty much use it as a DB in the wiki itself (pages have tables, key/value..inheritance, templates, etc...) but you can also interface with the API, write dekiscript, grab the XML...
I like this idea. I have heard of some sites that are trying to pull together large datasets for various things for open consumption, but none that would allow a wiki feel.
You could start with something as simple as an installation of phpMyAdmin with a known password that would allow people to log in, create a database, edit data and query from any other site on the web.
It might suffer from more accuracy problems than wikipedia though.
OpenRecord, development of which seems to have halted in 2008, seems to approach this. It is a structured wiki in which pages are views on the data. Unlike RDBMSes it is loosely typed - the system tries to make a best guess about what data you entered, but defaults to text when it cannot guess. Schemas appear to have been implied.
http://openrecord.org
An example of the typing that is given is that of a date. If you enter '2008' in a record, the system interprets this as a date. If you enter 'unknown' however, the system allows that as well.
Perhaps you might be interested in Couch DB:
Apache CouchDB is a document-oriented
database that can be queried and
indexed in a MapReduce fashion using
JavaScript. CouchDB also offers
incremental replication with
bi-directional conflict detection and
resolution.
I'm working on an Open Source PHP / Symfony / PostgreSQL app that does this.
It allows multiple projects, each project can have multiple directories, each directory has a defined field structure. Admins set all this up.
Then members of the public can suggest new records, edit or report existing ones. All this is moderated and versioned.
It's early days yet but it basically works and is already in real world use in several projects.
Future plans already in progress include tools to help keep the data up to date, better searching/querying and field types that allow translations of content between languages.
There is more at http://www.directoki.org/
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Wikibase yet, which is the software that powers Wikidata.