Database design – The CASA Blog Network

Gineau-Bissau imported 500,000 litres of ‘Ice, Snow and Potable Water’ in 2003

Posted on Monday 5 August 2013 by roblevy

So, like, trade data, yeah? It’s great isn’t it? All the world’s trade in tangible products, itemised by zealous customs officials, and browsable by the idle researcher, thumbing through a Who’s Who-style almanac of fascinating trade numbers, discovering little gems … Continue reading →

Database design, Trade Data

Connecting R to PostgreSQL

Posted on Wednesday 8 August 2012 by roblevy

The most stupidly named database management system is, sadly, also the system of choice for my research group, the powers that be having apparently no interest in the fact the you can’t pronounce the name, can’t remember how to write … Continue reading →

Database design, postgresql, R, r studio

ISO3 Country Codes (things we learn as researchers)

Posted on Tuesday 7 August 2012 by roblevy

This year I have mostly been mapping country names from data sources found online to ISO3 country codes which are actually useful for something. The continuing proliferation of data sources whose only country indicator is something like “Virgin Is. (UK)” … Continue reading →

Database design

Directly query DB in QGIS

Posted on Thursday 2 August 2012 by roblevy

Sometimes a plugin comes along which changes your life. Fast SQL Layer from Pablo T. Carreira is just such a plugin. It allows you to execute arbitrary SQL queries against your underlying database, meaning that views and queries can now … Continue reading →

Database design

My first choropleth

Posted on Thursday 2 August 2012 by roblevy

I’ve managed to get some data onto my PostGIS database, and have got my first visualisation result. Since the aid dataset is large (c. 1,000,000, source: aiddata.org, the dataset is called ‘aid data 2 short’) I’ve summed over donors and … Continue reading →

Database design, Development Aid

Giving aid to non-existent countries

Posted on Tuesday 31 July 2012 by roblevy

In the big, fat dataset I’m using to study what affects the global flow of development aid, I’ve come across a problem which researchers must have dealt with a million times from scratch, and never published the results of how … Continue reading →

Database design, Development Aid

Categorising data

Posted on Monday 23 July 2012 by roblevy

In developing a data structure which will provide for the needs of many different research projects, there’s a difficult balance to be struck. The structure needs to be generic enough to cope with the very different needs of all these … Continue reading →

categorisation, Database design