Suggestions for blood pressure analysis program

Iam just starting out learning Reginald after having used Rexx for
many years on the mainframe and Quercus. The Reginald User Forum
(http://nnnn.3322.org/?a=f&b=1) seems to be down again, so I'll post
this question here. I hope that's OK.

For my first exec, I'd like to write a program to keep track of my
blood pressure readings. I'll take readings at various times of day
and then I'd like to do some analysis, such as computing averages in
the morning vs the afternoon.

In Quercus, I would write the data to a flat file (.dat or .txt) as a
sequence of records with a specific format:

date time sys dia pulse comments
date time sys dia pulse comments
date time sys dia pulse comments
date time sys dia pulse comments
...

This works well enough, but has some drawbacks.

I see that Reginald has an interface to database engines (OBDC). I
might like to use this little program to learn how that works. I have
some familiarity with Access.

What do I need to install other than the OBDC module? I have Office
2007 Pro, which includes Access. Will that do it?



Is there another approach that I should consider for this application?

On Aug 22, 7:18 pm, Snotty Wafflelips <Sno...@Wafflelips.unk> wrote:
> Iam just starting out learning Reginald after having used Rexx for
> many years on the mainframe and Quercus. The Reginald User Forum
> (http://nnnn.3322.org/?a=f&b=1) seems to be down again, so I'll post
> this question here. I hope that's OK.
>
> For my first exec, I'd like to write a program to keep track of my
> blood pressure readings. I'll take readings at various times of day
> and then I'd like to do some analysis, such as computing averages in
> the morning vs the afternoon.
>
> In Quercus, I would write the data to a flat file (.dat or .txt) as a
> sequence of records with a specific format:
>
> date time sys dia pulse comments
> date time sys dia pulse comments
> date time sys dia pulse comments
> date time sys dia pulse comments
> ...
>
> This works well enough, but has some drawbacks.
>
> I see that Reginald has an interface to database engines (OBDC). I
> might like to use this little program to learn how that works. I have
> some familiarity with Access.
>
> What do I need to install other than the OBDC module? I have Office
> 2007 Pro, which includes Access. Will that do it?
>
> Is there another approach that I should consider for this application?

While I can certainly appreciate your desire to learn Reginald, if the
problem you have defined for yourself has any real meaning to you then
I suggest you spend your time learning R: http://www.r-project.org/.
Its free, fun, very advanced, and a complete data analysis tool. As a
Reginald problem I suggest a program that would create a file
containing data on all files in a folder (and subfolders), one file
per line, so that you can analyze the characteristics of those files
in R. Things like, file with longest name, largest file, median file
size, list of the largest 50 files, ... You get points for recursion
in the Reginald program.

On Sun, 24 Aug 2008 11:34:28 -0700 (PDT), FlowerStone
<bab@triarcconsulting.com> wrote:

>On Aug 22, 7:18 pm, Snotty Wafflelips <Sno...@Wafflelips.unk> wrote:
>> Iam just starting out learning Reginald after having used Rexx for
>> many years on the mainframe and Quercus. The Reginald User Forum
>> (http://nnnn.3322.org/?a=f&b=1) seems to be down again, so I'll post
>> this question here. I hope that's OK.
>>
>> For my first exec, I'd like to write a program to keep track of my
>> blood pressure readings. I'll take readings at various times of day
>> and then I'd like to do some analysis, such as computing averages in
>> the morning vs the afternoon.
>>
>> In Quercus, I would write the data to a flat file (.dat or .txt) as a
>> sequence of records with a specific format:
>>
>> date time sys dia pulse comments
>> date time sys dia pulse comments
>> date time sys dia pulse comments
>> date time sys dia pulse comments
>> ...
>>
>> This works well enough, but has some drawbacks.
>>
>> I see that Reginald has an interface to database engines (OBDC). I
>> might like to use this little program to learn how that works. I have
>> some familiarity with Access.
>>
>> What do I need to install other than the OBDC module? I have Office
>> 2007 Pro, which includes Access. Will that do it?
>>
>> Is there another approach that I should consider for this application?
>
>While I can certainly appreciate your desire to learn Reginald, if the
>problem you have defined for yourself has any real meaning to you then
>I suggest you spend your time learning R: http://www.r-project.org/.
>It's free, fun, very advanced, and a complete data analysis tool.

Thanks for the pointer.