Mineralogy Database

URL:http://www.webmineral.com

The mineral website is a hobby that I do when I am not out doing consulting for petroleum geology. In answer to your questions I'll explain how I used the programming tools to create the mineral website. The actual mineral database is in Microsoft Access. This is where I input the basic data. To produce the mineral website, I use MS access queries, forms and/or reports for exporting the mineral data out of access in a text format that is usable by SAS  or for importation into a MySQL table. I have different access reports, forms, and queries for most of the tables in the mineral database. The next step is done using the SAS language. For example, I use SAS to create each of the individual mineral pages using their macro language to format each page as an individual file (all 4,714+ of them). The SAS programming takes care of generating the links, creating the load files for MySQL, and creating the other pages. SAS creates the alphabetical pages, Strunz classification pages, Dana classification pages, and the chemistry pages. When all the pages are created, I use Expression Web ver 2 to chase down broken links, provide web continuity, and supply the final formatting.