Statistics and Databases 101

For those of us that continue to log our dives, one of the incentives and great rewards is to sit back and look at the results "in toto". It feels enormously satisfying being able to see all the total's of all our diving accomplishments in one place. So imagine looking at your total dive time on the statistics page of Dive Log on iPhone and seeing a smaller number than you expect. It's like getting "gypped" out of an experience.

Never fear, you didn't get gypped, it's all about notation. The time is expressed in days:hours:minutes. If you see 18:06:34 as your total dive time, this is not 18 hours, this is 18 days, 6 hours, and 34 mintues. Many people spend *a lot* of time underwater and so if we presented the time in hours, minutes and seconds, the hours number gets so large that it's impact is really lost. It makes more sense to display it in days first.

There is another implementation related issue in the Statistics section when you want to look at all the dives you've made in a particular place. In database parlance, a logbook entry can be a regular field, or it can be a pointer to another database that contains all the information about that field. So when you enter information into your log about Dive Site, City, and Country, Dive Log on iPhone will automatically enter the information into the Dive Site database, the City database, and the Country database and "point" to that information in your log. In the Windows desktop software, Diving Log 4.0, you have the option of entering this information in a linked/pointing way, or as a regular field on it's own. If you do the latter, it will *not* show up as a destination in your Statistics on the iPhone. If you are interested in your own Stats, always use the linking option in the desktop software. Why do we do it this way you ask? Simply speaking, performance. Using the built in database features allows your iPhone (remember, it *is* a phone not a desktop computer) to be much faster in answering your important Statistics questions.

So if you enter your Dive Site, City, Country information directly into your iPhone and then sync this information to your log on the desktop, you'll know exactly how many times you dove everywhere!