I’m contemplating creating a website that compares different areas of the country in regards to climate, cost of living, nearby acivities etc. I’m thinking I will need to create a database to pull this info from. I am taking an access 2016 class this semester so I should be able to build one. Is my thinking correct in that I will need one or do I just build scripts to pull from other sites? Still fairly new at this, been at it for about a year. I appreciate any help.
I am noob so I might be wrong
From where you will collect that information?
if those data will change time to time then it is better to use a database
and if those data are static then you can store it as JSON data.
But if your information is huge and for displaying certain comparison you only need specific data, not all the data then you should use a database.
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I did some research and found this site : Data.gov
The data is organized on different formats -
Hope this helps…
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I think it will most likely by static, though I will be attempting to update every 6 months or maybe once a year if certain categories do indeed change, such as employment rates, rental prices, home market and the like.
That is super helpful! Thank you so much!
Database every time.
This coming from the guy who used a file write for his image search API? lol.
Unless his project will work with APIs… US Govt has tons of open data. The OP might need several differnt APIs to specify the data he wants to track.
Hey, slightly more data needed here! For performance, a database will win every time.
Otherwise we would never need databases. 
You’re smarter than I thought. 
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The idea of the site is to be able to compare different military bases. We are trying to decide what our next base may be and I’m having to look all over to find cost of living, rental prices, local economy, job openings, climate, etc. I’d like to be able to have a site where different bases could be compared right next to each other. I know some things would be pretty static such as climate but I’d like to be able to pull up to date pay rates, home prices, and things that are generally dynamic in nature.
This is a neat idea.
You could use a database for this, but to my understanding it sounds like what you want to make is a directory of bases with information about each one that you intend to update manually.
If this is the case, I’d probably lean more towards a CMS or Wiki.
With a wiki, you also get to throw it open to other military families to keep the updates current. You could build this all from scratch, but I’d go for a third-party off the shelf solution in this case if it were my project.
I want to be able to pull up the bases, add them to a list and compare the info side by side so I don’t think a wiki would work but I’ll look into the other suggestions. Thank you.
Comparisons side by side would definitely benefit from a database and custom site rather than wiki or cms.
Just checked out the site. That’s amazing. Thanks so much.
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this sounds not dissimilar to the code camp costs calculator I made for Free Code Camp.
Quincey and I compiled all the data organized by camps & location, I organized it into a JSON file, then created a script which asked a few basic questions and d3 spit out comparison charts. It was a great project.
I ssuggest a similar route. it took me about 4 weeks from start to finsih and that was about 18 months ago, let me get you alink to it.
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If you are interested, you can check out my codepens for some early iterations of this project.
THe ones with the horizontal bar graphs and the ones with “Free code camp vs…” titles are part of the project. AT some point I took the development to my laptop, so you won’t see the final code, but I’m sure you could find it in the FCC repo on github since the whole site is open source.
Thank you for posting. This does give me a better idea of how to come at this.