FAQ

What time do the ratings get uploaded?

This simply depends on how much processing work I have to do to prepare the ratings before uploading them to the site.

On a typical day, the data will have been collated by about six or seven o'clock in the evening and then the whole process will take no less than three hours if there are no problems.

Some days it has been known to get the data uploaded to the site by a quarter past eight but this is rare and can only be achieved if I start at the earliest opportunity, that there are few meetings and the horses have, collectively, little form and, of course, that the data run runs smoothly.

The Friday and Saturday meets are usually the slowest to prepare as there will be more meetings, even more in the summer as there's more flat racing. And Bank Holidays could take until the early hours to finish the process: Boxing Day, for example, has been known to take me over twelve hours!

This doesn't take into account any problems that may be found on the way, either with the code or the data. This could delay the process by any amount of time and, of course, if the internet goes down for any reason then there is going to be a major problem.

The data is uploaded rather than eMailed for the simple reason that there's plenty of it produced each evening. The PDF files weigh in at a couple of megabytes for each, the CSV file is about a megabyte and there's hundreds, and I do mean hundreds, of smaller xml files which are prepared and are available for download. Putting this lot into a regular eMail regularly is going to be a major headache and something that I am not going to do.

There is one exception to the above when I will eMail the data and that is when the web site, the one you're reading now, goes down for whatever reason. If I am unable to upload the data to the website then I will post the CSV and the PDF files to the Discussion Group along with the some of the xml files. This will only happen in an emergency. It's not a neat solution but it ensures that we don't lose a day's racing data.