Discovering Biology in a Digital World

I don't care.

Give me a data set and I can play happily for hours. The sky gets dark. The dog entreats me over and over to please throw her sopping toy so she can go chase it. The cats walk between my hands and the keyboard and rub their bodies against my face.

But I don't see any of that when there's a computer screen in front of me and columns of data points to graph and ponder.

Nevertheless, even though I like analyzing data, I don't like to do repetitive things that look like a waste of time. Maybe it's a holdover from all the years of filling pipette boxes-by hand- or washing culture tubes, or doing minipreps. Whatever.  Excessively cutting and pasting things into text boxes at web servers is not for me.

Also, I'm not a programmer, I'm a scientist. I answer a question and move on to the next thing. The last thing that I want to do is spend a week writing a program to answer a question, and then use it and lose it.  Or even more horrifying, have someone else try to use it and ask me for help.  I know the rule.  Every line of code that you write is a line of code that you need to support.  Writing more abandonware is not the path for me.

Admittedly, I can be totally blind and inclined to take certain things for granted. Like my car, I don't ask how it works, nor do I care. Consequently, I was able to work with my company's software for many years, and be completely oblivious to the workings under the hood.

Then, we put out a new product (iFinch) and all of a sudden, for the first time, I realized that I could use our software in a class I teach!

I could have my students enter information into iFinch by using the comment form in FinchTV and we could collect all kinds of data. It's so cool!

But it wasn't enough. Even though the data were stored for each individual record, we couldn't obtain all of the data for the whole set of sequences.

Naturally, I complained.

Why do you let us store this data if we can't get our hands on it?

And the software developers set me straight.

It's all there, they said, open your eyes and you'll see it.

Thank you, Obi Wan. I thought snarkily.

But they were absolutely right. And I had been absolutely clueless.

All of a sudden I started looking around, poking through the database schema, and praticing phrases like:  "SELECT * from table."

I was stunned! How could I have missed this for so many years?

We store all kinds of things, things I've wanted for years, and data that I didn't even know I wanted, but I do, I do!

Shakespeare would have said:

There are far more things in heaven and databases, Horatio, than are displayed on your web pages.

Yes, sometimes I'm a slow learner. But my eyes have been opened and now that I understand the whole relational database thing, I've fallen in love with SQL*. 

In case you're wondering:

SQL is pronounced sequel and it stands for = Structured Query Language, it can be pronounced a couple of ways and you can find some amusing discussion about this from Joel.  We use SQL to pose questions to a relational database. 

Perl = Practical extraction and report language