Comments on: England and Wales schools database: available here in SQL format

By: Mike Fisher

Mike Fisher — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 11:05:25 +0000

Is there a more updated version of this available, as all schools in England and Wales are not on it thank you.

By: Mike Smith

Mike Smith — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 15:35:34 +0000

Of course, the big question is how do we plot these on a map (geocode) to really “exploit” the data. Looking at the XLS file (and yes they could have distributed as a CSV or perhaps the “open” OOXML, but then no one would have been able to use it!) the only real geocode information is the postcode. We could use OSs Code Point. Ahh, but then we wouldn’t be allowed to use it because the dataset would contain OS IPR… a government department, for a competition run by a government department. O what a tangled web….

By: Charles Arthur

Charles Arthur — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 15:57:00 +0000

(I would have explained @Richard above using more technical terms but comments using SQL commands are blocked – to prevent hackers.)

By: Charles Arthur

Charles Arthur — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 15:56:29 +0000

@Richard: umm, how are you trying to access it? If you make a database and then treat it as a local file to be loaded it should be able to figure it out on its own.

@Mo: if you export it as CSV (or tab-delimited), it will still have the same schema. You then have to import it into a table and slice and dice it as you will. It’s not as if this is in TNF – if there’s only one table there’s only one step to TNF!

@Rich: I might look at DabbleDB, but the useful thing is having it on one’s own machine to play around with.

My own frustration is there isn’t a downloadable set of league tables.

By: Rich

Rich — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 15:22:09 +0000

If this data is publicly available, it might be worth putting it on DabbleDB, which lets you host public datasets for free. No idea about whether the licence mentioned above would permit this though.

By: Mo

Mo — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 13:44:49 +0000

A verrry minor quibble, but while a MySQL dump is probably preferable to Excel’s binary blob, it’s not that useful if you don’t want your database tables to follow that schema or if you don’t use MySQL at all. Would exporting from Excel as CSV or tab-delimited not make a bit more sense in terms of usefulness?

By: Richard

Richard — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 13:19:46 +0000

I tried looking at this but some of the fields have apostrophies in them so the formatting goes wrong when I try to access. It would be helpful if possible to have the character fields delineated by double apostrophies ” ”

Thanks

By: Database Management » Blog Archive » England and Wales schools database: available here in SQL format

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 13:01:25 +0000

[...] geeky girl wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt As part of the government’s Show Us A Better Way competition, it has made available all sorts of databases and datasets and APIs that haven’t previously been available – such as the list of all the schools in England and Wales. Our only quibble with the latter was that it was only provided in Excel format – which as one commenter points out is a proprietary format (though free programs like OpenOffice will open it), and anyway to really begin doing useful things with such data you need to stuf [...]

By: Tom Loosemore

Tom Loosemore — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:46:41 +0000

Many thanks Charles!

By: Chris Fleming

Chris Fleming — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:30:16 +0000

Does the click-use license allow you to republish there data?