Need help figuring out how to start this project

[Scottyf11]

Hey everyone!

I want to create a database for every stock symbol, and all the data that is relevant. I was going to use excel/plugin/vb method, but the plugin I use keeps returning an error that I had too many web requests. So, I know that I need to make an sql database with all the data, and import it using excel. My problem is that I need to know how to get the data from various websites into the database. The languages I know are C++, vb, and pascal, but I am willing to learn perl, php, or whatever other language is needed to acomplish this task.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance

[Jordan]

I'm not 100% sure I understand but to get data from a database to a website you can use PHP, Perl, ASP or Ruby (with the RoR framework as well). You could also use C++ as CGI and Python but these languages aren't ideal or popular for web development (however, ebay is built entirely in C or C++).

I've used Perl, ASP, PHP and Ruby, of these my favorite is PHP and that is what I suggest.

[Scottyf11]

Ok here is exactly what I want to do. I have an excel file with every ticker symbol (stock market). I want to take data regarding these ticker symbols from various financial websites (reuters, yahoo, google) an input them into a database. So this potential database would be HUGE!!! For every ticker symbol I would have their financial statements, beta, volume, etc. Once I get the data I can import it into excel and do different calculations to find quality investments. Is PHP the best for this type of task?

[TkTech]

It would be fairly easy to do this in PHP. And their are Excel classes so you can output the data directly from PHP to the spreadsheet.

One thing I can suggest for a database of this size and potential activity, I would recommend setting up a ramfs and running MySQL using it for your database. This would save your hard drive thousands of read/writes that would wear it down.