Hi,

Today is my first time in the forum.

I come from the humanities field, both history and archeology, and since a long time ago I have been seeking a reliable database and easy to manage. I tried to learn MySQL and Base, but I feel that both of them involve a long learning curve, and I don't have enough time to do it. I think that Kexi can fill my needs.

Today I'm involved in an archaeological project, and I saw that its director, and many other archaeologists that work in my area, make their databases on Excel. I have convinced him to use Kexi as our primary database, because I think that is stable, has a bigger storage capability, and is easy to manage. And as I have explained to him, we can do the statistical analysis in a spreadsheet, exporting the data from Kexi to a csv file.

I have been looking for other examples of archaeological projects that have used Kexi as his primary database, but I couldn't find any. I wonder if you have any informations, or examples, about how to implement an archaeological database on Kexi.

Sincerely,

Pastor Gómez

Hi Pastor Gómez,
Users of Kexi typically keep their designs/data out of the public, just like you probably would (unless your organization has policy to publish the data somehow). The archaeological database is an interesting one but quite specific.

You may receive some introductory support if you send (even to privately to me - staniek@kde.org) your excel (and any other) files so it will be easier to figure out your data structures and business processes.

These are almost all steps that are ideally needed: http://www.slideshare.net/umerkhalidhab ... gadatabase

Optionally, if you offer the files to the public, you'd have more chance that more people know what you need and how to support you.

Finally, there already exist programs such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated ... l_Database. Kexi-based apps may be easier to modify but when you use it, you start from scratch if there is no existing template.

Best regards.

Thanks a lot for your help!

The idea would be to make a template that might be useful for all the archaeologists interested to work using free software.

There is an archaeological Linux distribution named Archeos, but the programmers decided to include Base as their default database. But I am not confident with Base, because I have read many times that it breaks easy, and then that you can lose your data.

Of course there are not a single archaeological database design. The one that I need must include different tables, between them:

1.- A table for the archaeological sites, with geographical data).
2.- A table for the archaeological operations (Operation, Sub Operation, Unit, Level).
3.- Table / tables related to the material to be analyzed.
4.- Table about the archaeologists / technicians on charge of the operations, analysis, etc...

If the database design is good, later we will be able to make queries, with the objective to make cvs files to work the statistics with other software, like Calc or Knime.

I am a Linux user, but the project's director is a Windows user. As his computer is powerful enough, we are considering to install a virtual machine with a Linux distribution to run Kexi. We are also planning to install Dropbox in this virtual machine to save the files in real time. Any suggestion about the appropriate Linux distribution to run Kexi in this virtual machine is welcome.

Thank you again for your time,

Pastor.

Thanks for the further details. Many good ideas.

Ideally, Kexi shall be available on any distribution, and the newer version, the better. I am not convinced by creators of domain-specific distributions: what if professionals work in two domains like sound analysis and archeology?

I think the most beneficial for your case may be to use a popular and easy distro such as openSUSE or (K)ubuntu. This can simplify the process of preparing prepackaged Kexi versions, possibly with domain-specific extensions. More people use your distro, more chances there are for a recent and specialized software. And prepared packages e.g. with awesome support for geo-data would serve more people than archeologists.

Furthermore if you'd be able to compile Kexi (or have someone who does this for you), as at least one user (regularly contributing to Kexi) does, you'd have access to the newest versions with specialized extensions.

The final release data of Windows version depend how this effort is funded. Basically there are not many professionals that like to that sit for free in the evening and maintain Windows software when Linux version is easily available. I bet the same goes for designing archeological databases So I hope the cost is not your major reason for picking Free Software for the task.

Linux VMs on Windows could be a reasonable temporary solution. And regarding dropbox: if you're connected to a network I'd rather recommend using database server such as MySQL/MariaDB or even PostgreSQL to offer instant access to synchronized data to your coworkers instead of playing with file sharing and risking breaking data consistency.

Thanks again. I'll keep in my mind your advices. Maybe I'll try to install Kexi on OpenSUSE.

The economic was only one of the factors which led me to use free software, and it wasn't the primary. Security, stability and free software philosophy are more important for me.

I designed and taught a university course of social network analysis using exclusively free software. One of my goals was to teach the students that they didn't need to incur on the piracy to get a academic level software. I stored the relational data on differents OpenOffice Calc files. Now I'm thinking that I could store all the data in a single Kexi's file. I'll try to do it, and if it works I would like to share the results.

Sincerely,

Pastor Gómez.