Inconsistent handling of All Weather between daily_races and historic_races

0 votes
An a/w race in historic_races has race_type = "All Weather Flat", race_type_id = 15 (turf flat is 12) and no track_type field.

An a/w race in daily_races has race_type = "Flat" (the documentation mentions a value "AW Flat" that seems not to be used), there is no race_type_id, and you can only tell it's a/w from track_type = "Polytrack" - a field that in the documentation says has values "Left Handed", "Right Handed", "Straight" i.e. is documented as being for a completely different purpose.

Gaps between docuemntation and reality are one thing and understandable - been there - done that !  But is the inconsistency between the handling of all weather races in daily_races and historic_races as intended, or is it now likely to change, having been pointed out ?

My reason for asking is I'm writing code to use these fields, and am not sure whenther to pull in data scraped from Sporting Life to supplement daily_races or rely on SmartForm entirely since the a/w flagging seems a bit iffy.  You might think this doesn't matter most of the time.  However today we have Lingfield running three turf and four a/w races.

While I'm at it, I note that the occasional historic race is incorrectly flagged as all weather.  For example one Brighton race has this problem.  At least one at Nottingham also.  There may be others too.  I guess I could correct this data in my copy of the database, but would be great if you would do similarly in your master copy.
asked Jul 6, 2016 by hyoung Novice (410 points)

1 Answer

0 votes
Hi -

The field name description and the track type is a documentation mistake, as you point out.  This will be changed in future.

The data is always provided as per the feeds we collate, and occasionally there are inconsistencies - it should be noted that similar inconistencies appear on racing websites from time to time.

One workaround tthat is not mentioned above, that you may take advantage of, is the going field.

You can query this whenever it is "Standard" in order to be sure that an all weather surface was being raced on - although at times some historic turf races at Lingfield have escaped the net.
answered Jul 11, 2016 by colin Frankel (19,280 points)
The suggestion to use the going field needs in addition to "Standard" to also factor in "Slow" and "Standard to Fast", each used occasionally for Southwell and Wolverhampton respectively.  Actually what I'm doing is running some UPDATE scripts to correct the database having cross referenced each race that seems in error with an alternative data source.
...