On 16/09/14 21:36, Konstantinos Kaleris wrote:
Dear gretl developers,

greetings from Patras, Greece, from a small workgroup that was formed in the frame of a seminar regarding open source software at the University of Patras.
In the case of our group, the task is to extend gretl according to the needs of our work, hoping that other people would also find these features useful.

Our first attempt would be to extend the database list and provide users with the possibility to access data from some other statistics sources - especially at first containing greek/european data. As we understood so far, ODBC provides an interface for gretl to interact with database servers and that the databases provided in the default installation of gretl reside on a database server dedicated to gretl. We would like to investigate the possibility of accessing databases that reside on other/external servers. This email is an attempt to make a first contact and see if there is anybody who has experience from similar tasks and could possibly give us hints on the process!! For a reply we would be glad. And we hope to be able soon to contribute to the gretl community!

Thank you for your time and wishes for a nice evening (or morning??)
Konstantinos, Vasia, Vaggelis


Dear Konstantinos,

some of the gretl databases are built from external databases in other servers. The directory /utils in the gretl CVS tree contains some C programs which are used to import them. You may find there script for FRB, FRED and NBER databases.

There is also a database from the Bank of Spain which is imported to a gretl database. Allin created a C program also for this database and now I use to manage the updates. So I know more specifically this case. The Bank of Spain maintains its historical time series data in CSV files, and all of them are listed in a catalog file. Our C program downloads the catalog and then all the CSV files and imports all the series to a gretl database. I think this program is not now in the gretl CVS so I will send you in private.

Your question about the possibility of accesing databases outside the gretl server is something I have been thinking on before. For example, we could ask Allin to put in the gretl preferences, in the "network" tab, a place for a "local database server" (a folder on a web page) which could be different for every user. In this way, Spanish people could put there the address of a url which contains the Bank of Spain database, and greek people some database folder from Greece. This has the advantage that each local database can be managed by some local people so, firstly do not depend on Allin to post updates and secondly we relieve him of this task. But it has the disadvantage that for example the greeks will not see the Spanish data (and vice versa). I think this is not a great problem, so I would vote for this change.



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