Re: Find "smallest common year"

Sorry,

I forgot to mention my table design, which is like this:

name 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Afghanistan ....
Albania ....

(Yep, I know, bad table design.... :-)). I tried to change it to the
more common "id | year | value" format, but there were too many SQL
problems afterwards for the different queries/calculations we need to
have....)

So, the mentioned SQL unfortunately doesn't work in that case....

Stef

On Sep 27, 2007, at 1:52 PM, William Leite Araújo wrote:

> If I understood your question, maybe it's you want:
>
> SELECT min(<desired data>) FROM table1 JOIN table2 ON
> (table1.data_field = table2.data_field);
>
> 2007/9/27, Stefan Schwarzer <stefan(dot)schwarzer(at)grid(dot)unep(dot)ch >:
> Hi there,
>
> my aim is to plot a line graph for a single country but for two or
> three variables. Now, one could use two different y-axis (if there
> are two data sets with different units); but it's not really the
> right way to analyse data.
>
> One should rather normalize them to a base year to enhance
> comparisons. To achieve this, one would set the values for a specific
> year to 1 (or 100) and put the other values of all variables in
> relation to it.
>
> Thus, taking two variables, say,
>
> Fish Catch
> - in Thousand Metric Tons
> - data available for 1975 to 2005
> and
> Total Population
> - in Million People
> - data available for 1960 to 2005
>
> Country is Kenya.
>
> The "smallest common year" would be 1975. One needs thus to set the
> values for that year to 1 (or 100), and calculate the other values of
> the variables in respect to the needed factor.
>
> Now the question is how to find that "smallest common year"
> automatically, via SQL or PHP?
>
> Can anyone give me a hint? Thanks for any help!
>
> Stef
>
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>
> Stefan Schwarzer
>
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> William Leite Araújo
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