Kindergarten Lottery Technical Information

How did the data get in the database?
Warning: this is not the "best way" to do it - I am working on that. *grin*
I took the spreadsheet and first imported it into a Microsoft Access database, which was relatively painless. After a bit of playing around, I was able to get the spreadsheet loaded into a Microsoft SQL Server (hereafter MSSQL). I generated some charts using this setup, but was unsatisfied and wanted something more dynamic; I really wanted to use a web front-end to support dynamic queries so folks could ask whatever they want and make the data as interactive as possible. That led me to loading the data into a MySQL database (hereafter mysql), which makes it really easy for me to write php pages to go against it. And Voila, here we are.

So, keep in mind I preserved the data as much as possible, including cryptic column names. All of the worksheets from the original spreadsheet are included, and some of them (ie, "SEAT CONTROL") were already formatted - they were loaded "as is". Some data has Microsoft-specific characters (ie, "smart-quotes") and these were translated into "unknown" characters. I figured they did not make much of a difference, but perhaps that can be something to look into in the future. Also, I did not like how the numbers, by default, were translated into "doubles", meaning they are floating numbers with excessive precision (should only be integers).

Update 25May2010
I decided against adhoc sql access. There are several issues involved with offering free query access. Most of all, this entire site is hosted as a privilege and free of charge, and I dearly do not want to abuse that. I am not only concerned about sql-injection attacks (humorous example), but I also do not want to be in the business of helping folks tune their queries, or teach them how to write SQL. I mean, actually, I do very much (I teach a class at Parkland), but I do not want to get wrapped up in that for this particular project.

To Do