Thursday 9 June, 4PM CET (Hybrid Webinar)
MATEUSZ ZAWADZKI
ABSTRACT: Data is at the centre of all research projects, and the amount of data generated by researchers grows at an unprecedented pace. It is more and more commonly coming from automatic data loggers or IoT devices, making it impossible for humans to handle it efficiently and reliably anymore, particularly when using classic tools like Microsoft Excel. In addition to that, in the nevermore connected world, research teams grow in size and comprise people from across the globe; it puts data integrity at even higher risk due to such trivial regional differences in file management like decimal or list separation methods. Relational databases offer highly reliable and secure data storage and swift data retrieval. Communication with databases, either local or cloud-based, is ensured by robust and straightforward SQL (Structured Query Language). Some RDMS allow multiple people to work on the data simultaneously at admin-defined privilege levels, ensuring no conflicts corrupt the core datasets. The results of queries can be further handled in, e.g., Python or R, what makes the databases incredibly versatile. This seminar presents an application of SQLite and PostgreSQL databases in an interdisciplinary and interinstitutional groundwater-related project GROW. Also, it offers an introduction to the features of QField, an open-source field data collection application.