Mark,

Yeah, I didn't explain that real good did I?

The problem is the system itself is fairly complex. Lets see if I can explain this a little better.(this is re-write #6)

Background:

I am a data analyst for the U.S. Marine Corps. We have(for about 2-1/2 more months) that tracks the readiness of our aircraft on a daily basis. This is how it works basically. Every maintenance action done on an aircraft has between 2 and 26 records) Those are downloaded by the squadron analysts and run through this program. It prints out a list with a time line for the month showing the status's of the aircraft by hour. and the overall percentage it is flying at based on the current days reported for the month. I am not to worried about generating a timeline. But I need to get a report out that contains the information in a simple to understand format.

I can do that at this level because we recieve the data monthly and get it all at once. They update every 2-3 days. Here I just summarize the data and say the acft was down this many hours for these reasons. I don't need to know what days and times. They need to have the report down to the hour and then they need the total hours as well. one maint action can have as many as 11 job status changes.

The problem is that a single aircraft may have up to 300 maintenance actions per month. I cannot figure out how to summarize that data and show when the acft are in what status's and get it to update if I use just the one table.


I don't know if this cleared up anything at all or made it worse. I have never had to break things down quite like this. Everything we work with is historical and when I get data from them it is the final info so it is fairly easy for me to work with. This is a little more difficult. One of the other problems that has thrown me for a bit of a loop with this is how I am going to specify # of reporting days and the fact that we work with 4 digit julian dates and 4 digit numeric times (e.i. 1543 = 15:43) I have a program that converts julian dates to calendar dates, and one that converts the time to decimals (we count down time in decimal. all the data that comes to me is in text format.

Sorry this got long winded and confusing. I have been trying to figure this last part out forever now and just don't know where to start.


Thanks,

Jeff