Weather Software > WeatherLink/weatherlink.com by Davis Instruments

archive interval

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Mark / Ohio:
I only clear mine if I get an error trying to download it.

Anole:

--- Quote from: "ncpilot" ---Yeah, that's what I tell the women, I have a HUGE database.... :lol:

With disk storage so cheap now per Gig, database size isn't a concern... I did once use my raw data to graph some stuff in Excel, and it definitely has a lot of observation points with a 1 minute interval...
Marc
--- End quote ---


Well keep in mind the actual numbers we're talking about here. At a 1 minute interval you'll have 525600 records for a year. For a 5 minute interval your talking about 105120 records for a year. Unless you are looking at really small time frames (like hours), or your graphs are really, really, really wide, you aren't going to see any difference in the 1 minute vs. 5 minute intervals.

Additionally, if you want to do things with your database in Excel the database size is very relevant. Current versions of Excel will only take up to 65,536 rows of data. At a one minute interval that's only 45.5 days. If all you need is to work with is a month of data that would be ok, but even then you'll have to break the database file up into chunks to work with it. That can be a pain in and of itself regardless of how big the database is and the PITA factor goes up with the size of the database.

With five minute interval you'd be able to work with 227.5 days. Still not a year but better than 45 days.

ncpilot:
Good points. Another option is to use Access to store the data, and Excel to query the Access database.

In any case, cutting back to 5 minutes seems prudent...

Anole:
An Access db would be a much better way to work with a db file of the sizes we're talking about.

tinplate:
I like 5 minutes. I used 1 minute for a while, but it seems like overkill since most of the sensors don't change that frequently except for wind. Since the archive data from the console contains the high wind speed over the archive period in addition to the avg wind speed over the archive period, you won't lose the peak gust. Another benefit is that the lower data point density speeds up display of graphs over long time periods. For me, the greatest benefit is that if weatherLink craps out while you're on vacation, you come back to a big hole in your data. Fortunately I switched from 1 to 5 minute archive period a couple months ago. I was out of town for a little over a week recently. I came home and was very displeased to see that WeatherLink had hung several hours after I left town. When I saw that, I quickly killed it and reran it and did a download. The archive was something like 98% full and I didn't lose anything. If I'd been on 1 minute, I'd have lost several days of data which included the record high for the year that was logged while I was away.

Steve

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