I spent the first half of the day discovering that very few people on the internet seem to be interested in transferring information from 5.25″ floppy disks to modern computers in 2011, and that even fewer people have the necessary equipment to do it, or even know how. The most informative site I could find claimed the best option is to perform a NULL modem transfer with telecom programs, which it elaborates on here andhere. Another article discusses a software package called macADT which facilitates information transfer between Apple II and Macs via serial ports and modems.
After our meeting with Dave Musicant, I started copying the rawdata table to a warehouse table and adding indexing. I created an index for both the temperature and month fields in the warehouse table, and then performed a number of queries on both tables. The results of these tests were inconsistent, with the indexed table only performing more quickly on certain queries. Using the “explain” command on one such query indicated that the indexing was in fact being used in the search, so I’m confused as to why the indexed table wouldn’t perform better. I’ll have to investigate this issue further tomorrow.
-Katherine