The National Capital FreeNet Database Project - 1994 Report ----------------------------------------------------------- By: Chris Hawley Introduction The NCF Database Project was born of necessity. As the systems and user base grow, the need to manage the information about each person, company, donor, and deposits grows with them. When we accept a donor's financial or other gift, they deserve our thanks and recognition. When we ask ourselves how FreeNet will raise the necessary funds to survive and grow, we need to be able to track our past and current funding efforts so we can make maximum use of our experiences. The current system has become too constricting; we have outgrown it. We need a more powerful and scalable system to store and retrieve the data we need. We need a database! Highlights of 1994 In mid-July, a meeting was held, a non-technical meeting to start discussing how such a system would function without looking at the implementation and technical issues. This was the first formal discussion that I am aware of. Approximately two and a half months later, the database software had been donated, and we needed to get it installed and functional, and get some development and configuration done to make it usable for NCF. This is when I joined the "database team". At that time, the people involved were Ian Allen, Lisa Donelly, myself, Kyla Huckerby, Brian Monkman, Andrew Patrick, Gordon Pearson, Michael Richardson, Sandy Shaw, and Jean Wilmot. Over the next couple months, the database software was installed, but due to access limitations and things like terminal server idle timeouts, the installation was not quite complete. In this state, we started 1995. Looking ahead: 1995 and beyond As we entered 1995, our work had just begun. The bulk of the labour will be in refining the user interface to give us the efficiency we need in processing donations and new user registrations, and custom reports and queries for what could be called "market research". With the migration of our current tools from UNIX scripts and text files into database files and SQL commands, debugging and refining as we go, the overall effectiveness of many administrative and developmental tasks will be much enhanced. These tasks include, for example, new user registration, user maintenance (getting forgotten passwords), statistics on new users per unit of time, fundraising results tracking per "solicitation", per user, per time period, etc. We have every reason to believe that the new process will almost immediately improve the office staff's efficiency and ability to track registrations and donations. We expect some growing pains, some learning curve time perhaps, but no serious impediments are predicted. One future need may be dedicated database server hardware, or having the server machine not do significant other work when database intensive operations occur. We will see how performance degrades as the size of the data increases. Here's to a more efficient, streamlined information management system for the FreeNet! Chris Hawley - ah654 February 1st, 1995