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How does it work?

- for the "your techno mumbo jumbo freaks me out":
A database holds all the data, and each table in the database (similar to a very complicated excel spreadsheet) contains columns that refer out to data in other tables, which makes it "relational". For example, a setlist entry will contain the ID of the song it contains, rather than the song name -- this allows us to keep each collection of similar data in one place.

One of us uses a series of web forms to enter data into the database (there were close to 3500 entries in the database on the day of launch, and over 28400 at the release of v2.0), and the public site pages go "ask" the database for whatever is available at that moment. Every time you visit the site, you're being given the absolute freshest butter we can provide.

- for the technically inclined:
The database driven portion of this site was developed using PHP and a highly relational MySQL database. At launch, the database contained 10 tables, 56 columns, and nearly 3500 entries, and the number of entries is currently growing at the rate of hundreds a day (nearly 1000 just the day before launch!). The back end code was written using OMDB, a powerful set of object oriented PHP libraries I wrote to do data abstraction for MySQL. As of February, 2008 (two years from the original launch), the database contains 18 tables, 121 columns, and 30,240 individual records (that's 3,658,072 data points!).

The data is all live and fully normalized and relational, meaning that no data point is repeated twice. There is a database table for each discrete item (songs, shows, venues, sets, setlist songs, etc.), and metadata tables that manage relationships. All of the numeric metrics are calculated on the fly (e.g. "times played" will always show an actual count of how many shows a song appears in).

For more information on OMDB, contact john at johnmcg dot com, or look here for some rudimentary documentation.

- the bottom line:
Come back often to see how the site grows and gets more interesting with every bit of data that's entered!