Whoa! Everybody slow down... I guess I need more explication.
I have a copy of the Shraytabase. I've also found Darryl's web site and have downloaded
some of his earlier files. Those two resources have helped me fill in a lot of the gaps I had
in early 2002, and eventually I hope they will aid me in resolving inconsistancies in my 2003
file.
I have been copying the set lists off the KFOG web site since 2002, which I believe is when
they started getting posted regularly there. It's a simple copy & paste operation. I keep them
in text files, one for each year. This makes them easy to search with simple command-line
utilities (i.e., grep). In the RR era the format of the set header line changed and the set listing
order was inverted to chronological from reverse chronological. More recently, the song lines got
reversed as well. Previously they were "artist - title", and now they're "title - artist". I griped
about this earlier, because I change it all before adding new set lists to my files in order to
maintain a format consistent with how it was done in previous years. This is all with an eye
toward eventually reading them into a database.
The Shraytabase is a spreadsheet, and I don't want to get into my "spreadsheets aren't
databases" rant here. But as a demonstration of that, perhaps someone would care to explain
how they would determine the artist who has won BOS the most, or the most played song from
1968, using the Shraytabase. I'm guessing it would take a fair amount of tricky Excel formula
manipulations to produce those answers. In contrast, if all the set lists were in a structured
database, I'm presuming that a fairly straightforward query statement is all that would be needed,
and the database program would do the rest.
Even with a database there are other hurdles. I correct spelling errors when I notice them, and
I've been slowly fixing other small formatting inconsistencies in my files. But as just one example,
Chicago, Chicago Transit Authority, CTA, and C.T.A. all appear with Questions 67 & 68.
