A Microsoft Access version of DGSD 1.1 is available here.
The tables and data in this version of the database are identical to those in the MySQL version. We have also included two example queries: Detailed Instances and Detailed Attributes.
- The Detailed Instances query is a table of spatial change events. It lists all the historical instances in the DGSD, along with the original entry from Hope Wright’s Alphabetical List of Geographical Names in Song China upon which the DGSD data was based.
- The Detailed Attributes query lists the demographic, rank and other attribute data held in the DGSD, as well as the point location of each entity.
Please keep in mind that Access is not the native database management system for the DGSD, and it is not optimized to handle the entity-instance model of this database. If you use Access to perform certain kinds of queries, you may need to conduct some post-processing and interpretation. For instance in MySQL you could perform a group concatenation on names and feature types to resolve the multiple instantiations (both in feature type and attribute, such as demography) of a single entity, whereas in Access this kind of aggregation must be done manually, either by specifying a very exact query or through later post-processing in order to parse the results correctly. We recommend that you download and utilize the MySQL version of the DGSD if you plan to conduct complex or extensive data analysis.
We thank Michael Fuller at UC Irvine for assisting with the MySQL to Access conversion.