Dragon Story Database

[Anaboe]

I've been keeping this Excell-sheet with ALL dragons ever released and much, much more info (release-date, periods of availability, if and when I got the dragon, how I got him, what lvl it is (and, in case of eggs and bred dragons, multiple lvls), how it was available, why it was available, what colors and type it is, if it's an Actric dragon, the revenue in coins, in what habitat is it), but it's getting a bit out of hand.


So now I'm thinking of puting it in a Acces database, but I'm not familiar with that.

Did anyone did the same? Can he or she give me any tips?

[JustKay]

I've been keeping this Excell-sheet with ALL dragons ever released and much, much more info (release-date, periods of availability, if and when I got the dragon, how I got him, what lvl it is (and, in case of eggs and bred dragons, multiple lvls), how it was available, why it was available, what colors and type it is, if it's an Actric dragon, the revenue in coins, in what habitat is it), but it's getting a bit out of hand.


So now I'm thinking of puting it in a Acces database, but I'm not familiar with that.

Did anyone did the same? Can he or she give me any tips?

Wow, that is some foresight. I didn't think DS would last this long when it first started. It was just some casual fun... actually to be honest, it was for some free gems in Fashion Story

While I can't say I've done anything like that in recent times, given it's all Microsoft office (which share data between apps well), you should be able to do a "Data Import" when you create your new Microsoft Access database. Assuming all the data is in one sheet, that should load your records into one large table that you can sort of search through. To be frank, the search capabilities in that form are probably not so much more powerful than your filtering in Excel. That's the zero data design approach.

If you really, really wanted to make a fully fledged database for DS, then you'd want to do a bit more data design. Split the data into multiple tables, add some foreign key references, normalise the data, etc. That would involve planning to split the Excel data into Entities, creating the tables and setting up referential integrity rules, then doing multiple partial data loads to populate the tables. Then you'd probably want to do some spot checks to make sure you got it right and all the data has been migrated. It is quite a bit of work, and it's also possible you're get the tables design "wrong" (or right for now but wrong for later if DS release new features) and will have to do more transforms later.

One other consideration, is that Access databases were only ever meant to be small, low use data repositories. They have a size limit of 4GB I think, after which the DB locks up and it's virtually impossible to recover. While I don't think you're at this stage with DS data, maybe 50 years down the track if the game is still going and you're still playing this might be an issue

Good luck!