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Database Service


BRERC collects data on protected species, designated sites, and priority habitat. Species data is entered into dBase files using Lotus Approach. Other data is managed in MapInfo.

LIVE Services provides a copy of the species data, without normalization, in a PostgreSQL database. This is reloaded daily (at 6am) and automagically tracks changes to the structure of the files concerned.

Unicode

Because of this project's (and much of the GIS world's) dBase legacy Latin1 encoding was used for the original database. Unicode UTF-8 is now the standard throughout computing - so the switch had to come. See The UnicodeĀ® Standard: A Technical Introduction for the significance of this move. Despite some compatibility Latin1 cannot be treated as UTF-8 without conversion, so this has been introduced where necessary.

dBase File for Translation

To translate password-protected dBase files we require a translation table for each different password in use (tran1.dbf, tran2.dbf, etc). This starter file, which is unprotected, can be used to generate such tables. They are just password-protected versions of the original file and must be saved on the Synology fileserver in folder '/IT/db_development/'.

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