It's 20 May now, which means that it's been a week since I last posted. That's pretty negligent on my part, so I figure it's time to post again.

Actually, the truth of the matter is that I just got help in figuring out how to do a particular PostgreSQL command. That was probably about 10-15 minutes ago. It's still running, so I decided to take some time to update my blog. I really hope it doesn't crash; I really have no way to tell if its still running. In all reality, it could have crashed long ago and I wouldn't know. On the other hand, it could be running fine, and if I cancel it to retry, it could ruin all the progress that it has so far. I wish I knew why my server querries have been taking so long; the time that they take seems to get longer every day. I just lost and reestablished connection to the server, so I should probably cancel and retry the command.

I'm still trying to build a table with information for all the individual customers - cutting out wholesalers, coorperations, government entities, churches, exc. The first problem I've run into is that customers are often mislabeled. I have to look not only at their class, but also at the profile class. Some of these seem to be significant, and others seem to just be randomly assigned. I've done some filtering that I think has identified viable customers, but I really can't be completely sure without sifting through the 300000 odd customers. I don't plan on doing that.

Now that I've identified customers, I'm trying to put together information for them. In particular, I'm trying to have the computer count the number of purchases they've made through various channels, then sum the values of those purchases. That wouldn't be too difficult, except that it takes so long to run each one of the queries that I pretty much have to get it right the first time I do it. The computer is still processing the first of those querries - counting the retail purchases each customer has made. I hope it's done soon so I can move on to another part of the table.