[ABE.pm] Is this a crazy idea?

[Faber J. Fedor]

I'm working on a web-based graphical report.  (I'm using Chart Director
(http://www.chartdir.com/) which freaking rocks for creating charts.)

What I'm graphing is deciled data over time, e.g. take the S&P500, break
it into 10 pieces of 50 companies each, average the values for a
specific variable for those companies and do it for each month between
$startdate and $enddate.  Repeat for the the different variables (up to
22), for each index (currently 12) such as S&P400 (40 companies each in
each decile), Russell 3000 (300 companies in each decile), etc. On top
of that, there are two ways of deciling which I won't get into. 

Since it takes up to four minute to generate the datasets, I figured I'd
create a separate MySQL table for each combo (index, variable, deciling method)
and store the averages for the entire possible date range.  The tables
have a structure of "date, decile1, decile2, decile3,...,decile10'.
Since there can be up to 528 combos, I generate the table on the fly
when it is first requested.

The client pulls up a web page, selects his criterion, the cgi-bin
program pulls the data from MySQL, graphs it with ChartDirector and he
gets back four pretty and complicated graphs.  

Beleive it or not, it works well. OTOH, if I showed you the code, you'd
guys wouldn't let me attend the monthly meetings since the code is so
bad. :-)

Well, the client wants to see more data, which means my tables are
going to get more unwieldy.  So here's my crazy idea: instead of storing
the decile related data in the table, I create decile objects, probably
a HoH, and store the object in the table as a text field using the Storable
module.

(And since I'm not using any SQL functionality, I can store this data in
text files but that will probably have to wait for version 2.0 or more
likeyl the next set of reports sine I don't get a chance to go back and
rewrite the prototype code.)

The more I think about this idea, the more I like it.  So what's wrong
with it?



-- 
 
Regards,
 
Faber Fedor
President
Linux New Jersey, Inc.
908-320-0357
800-706-0701

http://www.linuxnj.com