Subject: Re: [SQL] Flight numbers data
From: Scott Marlowe <smarlowe@g2switchworks.com>
To: Achilleus Mantzios <achill@matrix.gatewaynet.com>
Cc: pgsql-sql@postgresql.org, pgsql general <pgsql-general@postgresql.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0603291103080.4731-100000@matrix.gatewaynet.com>
References: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0603291103080.4731-100000@matrix.gatewaynet.com>
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Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 10:50:03 -0600

On Wed, 2006-03-29 at 02:17, Achilleus Mantzios wrote:
> Hi, i am in the process of writing an application about
> tickets, flights, etc, and i am thinking of getting the primitive
> data ready at the begining and doing it the right way,
> (e.g. the user will just select a flight number and doesnt 
> have to enter the airports, airport coordinates, countries,
> airline name, airline code, departure/arrival times, etc...)
> 
> I found some sources on the web about airlines (codes, names, countries, 
> etc...), also i found about airports, but nothing about flight numbers!

That's cause companies that keep track of those things charge a LOT of
money for their datasets. 

> This application will be for enterprise (internal) company use,
> covering the flights of emploees around the world.
> 
> I was just wondering how internet ticket agents manage to do it.

They subscribe to some service that has this information in the back
end.  The data in that back end comes from the one or two sources of
that data who charge yearly subscriptions in the hundreds of thousands
of dollars.

> Has anyone from the postgresql camp ever solved such a problem?

Where I work, we're building a middle level system (look up the website
that goes with my domain).  And if we weren't in the airline reservation
industry, we couldn't afford the data sets.

> It is just that i wanna do it right, maybe play a little bit with AJAX 
> also who knows :)

But "doing it right" goes against almost every tenet of the airline
reservation industry :)  haha.  only serious.

Seriously though, you might be able to get your travel agent or whoever
you do reservations through to provide you with this information in some
kind of reliable format for the tickets you've bought.  If you can get
some kind of automated feed from them, that would be the best way, if
not, maybe they can email you the info each time, and you can cut and
paste it in.

There's much in the reservation industry that is basically a computer
implementation of a 3x5 note card system.  And none of those systems
were originally built to talk to each other, so it's often impossible
for a single user to get any kind of automatically created data from
such an industry.