Hello NatureMaprs,Our flora is well and truly in bloom and we are ready for all your exciting sightings! In saying this we would like to thank all our moderators for their time spent verifying sightin...

Hi entom2.

FWIW with great respect for all including for myself and you all.

Harrisi : Wonderful beetle, sighting and photograph . Thank you for making and sharing this .

entom2 :
How many users does your MS Access database(s) have? 1 or a few?
NatureMapr has quote: "12,557 contributors" (as at 2024 Oct 25th), let's estimate perhaps up to about 500 users at any one peak time (concurrent users). Try 500 concurrent users with your MS Access database, it will practically die (unless its set up gets really specially overhauled up for enterprise scale use).

In the 1990s professionally we used MS Access large databases with tables with hundreds of thousands of rows, and joins to many other tables in the schemas, including large RDBMS and GIS datasets,
for Au government work.

Then in the late 1990s I joined in using the Oracle organisation wide IT department's RDBMS which holds all of that organisation's financial and rates' payers information,
with their approval after i had proved my own work responsibility and reliability,
then we tendered for, approved a tendering contractor company and with them commissioned an organisation–wide GIS (Oracle RDBMS inclusive system.).

Then after another year or so and travelling to live with my Japanese then partner in Nagoya Japan, i then moved to my late father's far east Vic. ecosystems regeneration and organic vegetables nature farm (ca. 80 km's south of Bombala).
And subsequently went out from the farm for years or many months contract working in Sydney, Newcastle and Canberra for State and National governments' agencies where i was setting up and runnning ecological (flora and fauna and ecosystems inclusive) GISs–RDMBSs.
Michael Bedingfield databases of all kinds in this era can easily use powerful indexing to efficiently access single rows or tens – hundreds – thousands of rows out from many millions of rows.
In the MDBA in 2010 i had to analyse the CSIRO nation–wide complete streams' lines dataset of millions of vector lines and their descriptive data, first by extracting the Murray–Darling Basin ca. one third of the dataset – quick and easy in ESRI ArcGIS with powerful spatial indexes.
Then the computing intensive and not as easy work of intersecting every single stream line across the Murray–Darling Basin parts of NSW, ACT, Vic, Qld and SA with the environmental assets datasets from each of those jurisdictions.
With spatial databases' properly setup spatial indexes in ESRI ArcGIS that was also quick.

The slow, hard, computing most intensive process only came when,
the excellent director for wetlands then (who's a NatureMapr user here and who also left the MDBA back around that 2010–2013 period)
and the leader of the GIS team i was employed under —a globally recognised GIS computer scientist—,
jointly required that i buffer all of the MDB–wide streams' lines and buffer all of the NSW, ACT, Vic, Qld & SA environmental assets' datasets' points, lines and polygons from all of the MDB;
then rerun the intersection analyses as the intersections, of all of the polygons of the buffers of all of the MDB streams' lines and all of the buffers of all of the environmental assets datasets' points, lines and polygons;
to arrive at the Murray Darling Basin–wide (streams' lines) waterways buffer distance vicinity "key environmental assets" (KEAs) which were then published in the then Basin Plan and used for all the downstream analyses.

That, thousands of NSW, ACT, Vic, Qld and SA environmental assets' buffers' polygons intersected with ca. one million buffered MDB streams' lines,
really chewed hard through the fullest capacity of the computing power and on a single PC at a time, a single run of that process took 24 hours to complete – the IT department was required to assist with quarantining the computer from IT updates and management that turns it off at night and other assistance.
I recall now, they replaced my computer with a much more powerful one within that three months initial contract period.
That 24 hour process had to get re-run many times, due to then 2010 parliamentary politics' changing decisions during that three months i worked so very hard there.
I got the KEAs produced finally, delivered to the director of wetlands (after he had stood up to and suffered much political pressure uncalled for heat), and they went in to the plan.
And then I walked out, resigning, in disgust, together along with practically all 200 people of the rest of the MDBA then.
(Except the politically quarantined, organisation–wide and MDB–wide Sustainability Audit team of ca. 7 people.)
That Sustainability Audit team's leader told me a few years later when we bumped into each other while he was on holidays from the MDBA that in the 2010–2011 period, according to their audit stats, there was 114% employee turnover in 12 months – employed, quit, replaced and they quit too; and the general managers, CEO, department directors, board chairman and so on all left during that time to be replaced, i am told.

Let's hope MDBA is better now ! Yet the irony of this coming up in my feed in LinkedIn today : https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/4059388039 LOLOLOL .

If we all blindly touch one human reachable part of the elephant in the room, we all sense a little bit part of the truth of the bigger picture. But nobody human has any totalising sense of the whole bigger picture.
Hence we all have to work well collectively in real compassion and real truth–telling, team work (without politics).

Let's hope NatureMapr has inclusiveness of all of us and we all communicate up front and get along now too (without politics) !

Ohhrrr i have to choose who to vote for here in the Qld state politics election tomorrow – WT! – LOL .
Better go to sleep and say good night all !

Hi Michael, OK no worries. I am not sure what database NatureMapr is using but I use Microsoft Access 2010 which has 53,456 records in one of its tables, from which, for example, a self-referencing form selects the species names from all those records in less than 2 seconds while it loads. Once open, a 'drop-down' combo box is used to select (can auto-expand) a species name (so as to display in a subform all records for the species name I selected in the drop-down list) from that list, the list appearing the instant I click on the drop-down arrow (list shows 30 at a time) and which I can scroll through all species in those 53,456 records. I have no need whatsoever to break up species lists into regional areas. Perhaps worth investigating if your database is actually just as capable? All the best, Allen

Hi Allen. If we had every insect species on the national list it would be at least 100,000 long, so impossible. The national list we have has been built up gradually from absolute zero. As new species are found and uploaded onto our system the list is added to. You have the privilege of adding the new species. And Mark, the system is not scatty. You are still not using the system properly. See email.

Thanks for your efforts here gents. I'm proud of this one as it is my first ever buprestid shot from 16 years ago! A big 'seed' was planted and it finally came to life a decade later!

Thanks Mark. Its all very strange!