How much data is "HUGE"? Are you thinking of, say, asking 100,000 people 100 questions each? That's 10 million rows. For current computers, that is not a problem.

Just stick the data in a database. When you need to process it, the time taken to process the data will be minor compared to the effort of figuring out what questions to ask. If you know that particular items are going to be relevant (for instance the survey you're looking at, the age of the respondant, etc) then add appropriate indexes. Trying to optimize further at this point is seriously premature.

Several additional comments. First of all if the researchers have any statistical analysis packages that they are used to using, be prepared to export data in a format that those packages can use. Seriously, if you can write yourself out of the "thought-question-answer" loop, do so. On the same lines, if they don't have favorite tools, then seriously consider giving them one that doesn't involve you. For instance export the data in some Access friendly format, load the data into Access, then show them how to use Access. And finally, be prepared to learn some statistics yourself. For instance I've used tools like Statistics::Regression to good effect, but unless you know what they do or whether they fit, you won't be able to use them. (Or worse yet - and very commonly - you'll use them as a magic oracle and misinterpret the results.)

In reply to Re: Research App Optimization by tilly
in thread Research App Optimization by sskohli

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