I wrote before that I’m working on an app that reads data from a Davis weather station. With the help provided in that thread, I have something working well in retrieving the data and displaying it.
This project is something that is really going to only be for personal use (it’s not going to be anything I’m developing for public distribution). I’m mostly using this as a testbed application for me to tinker with to learn about things I’ve not really had need to deal with in the past.
Now, I’m wanting to start looking at storing historical data in a way that it is easy to retrieve. My initial thoughts were something as simple as a CSV file, but have also considered using a simple SQLite database.
All the data that I would be storing would be simple strings, a date and some integers (which would probably be stored as strings and converted as necessary). I’d like to be able retrieve data from the datastore for a specific date/time or a range of dates. All well and good, that simply points to a SQLite database, right?
But, then there’s a wrinkle. As I consider how I want to structure all this, I realize that I may want to run this application on multiple computers, but all pulling from the same datastore. If I have the application store something locally, that eliminates multiple application instances on different computers, right? Of course, I could simply have each instance of the application pull its own data from the weatherstation, but that seems wasteful and also opens up the possibility of data that doesn’t match. So, this points to a server solution.
I have a server host that offers a MySQL database, but something in my head tells me that this is way overkill for the very simple need I’m looking at here and I wonder if there is a simpler, lighter solution here that I’m thinking about.
I’d appreciate any thoughts on how I should structure and store this data within the context I describe above.
What am I missing in the way I’m thinking about this?
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