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Experts, is PHP and MySQL right for my project?
Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2010 9:42 am
by Nplaneta
I am looking to securely and efficiently take data from an online survey to a database that is compatible with a commonly used statistical software package (e.g. SPSS).
Is PHP the right platform for me to develop the survey on and what kind of database should I write to, MySQL?
Thanks,
Nick
Re: Experts, is PHP and MySQL right for my project?
Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2010 12:42 pm
by Jonah Bron
Yes, PHP is beyond capable of doing that. And you can use whatever database you want; MySQL is the most popular.
Re: Experts, is PHP and MySQL right for my project?
Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2010 3:00 pm
by Nplaneta
Thanks. Does anyone know if MySQL provides a good input for statistical software packages?
Re: Experts, is PHP and MySQL right for my project?
Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2010 3:15 pm
by Jonah Bron
Nplaneta wrote:... provides a good input ...
I don't know what that means. Do you mean would it work with statistics software? I suppose, if the software is setup to use MySQL. It's just another relational database...
Re: Experts, is PHP and MySQL right for my project?
Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2010 4:45 pm
by Nplaneta
Jonah Bron wrote:Nplaneta wrote:... provides a good input ...
I don't know what that means. Do you mean would it work with statistics software? I suppose, if the software is setup to use MySQL. It's just another relational database...
Exactly. That's the piece I'm missing. Does anyone know off-hand if the common statistical software packages (i.e. SPSS, SAS, STATA, etc.) are setup to work with MySQL?
Re: Experts, is PHP and MySQL right for my project?
Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2010 4:48 pm
by Jonah Bron
I don't know, but

Re: Experts, is PHP and MySQL right for my project?
Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2010 9:45 pm
by califdon
To reinforce what Jonah said, I merely searched for "spss" in Google and from the Wikipedia article on it I quickly found this sentence:
SPSS can read and write data from ASCII text files (including hierarchical files), other statistics packages, spreadsheets and databases. SPSS can read and write to external relational database tables via ODBC and SQL.
Since MySQL, of course, is a SQL based database, it is suitable, as is Postgres and nearly any other relational database. You can no doubt find similar information on other statistical software by the same method I used.