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Instructions for Downloading Data From IU Central MYSQL Servers

1. Only do this if you're really supposed to. This is serious business, and you can really break things.

2. Go to the website and log in (as the previous instructions told you). You'll see something like this:

3. Click on data on the left hand side of the screen. This will bring up a list of all the tables in the database. It will look something like this:

4. Select the table whose data you want to download by clicking on the properties link for the appropriate table.

  • Tables are sorted by experiment name, and then by table type (consent, survey data). Don't download consent data, that violates privacy norms.
  • DO NOT EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER click on "DROP" or "EMPTY". You will permanently delete data from the experiment.
    • This will cause:
      • God's wrath to rain down upon you
      • Skyler to get in his car, drive to Indiana, and throw water balloons at you
      • Your significant other / pet to die.
    • Seriously, don't press those buttons. That is probably the worst thing you could ever do in lab (besides throwing water balloons at Peter. He holds grudges.)

5. Once you have selected the table you want by clicking on properties, you will get a page with the list of variables.

  • Scroll down below the variables until you see a box like this:
  • Yes, it is called view dump. Feel free to giggle. The only buttons and changes you'll need to make are within this box. Like before, don't click on things outside of this box! You will mess things up!

5. Change the dump options to look like this:

  • Specifically:
1. Change structure only to CSV data
2. Change fields terminated by from a ; to a ,
3. Change fields enclosed by from "" to *nothing* (as in make it blank)
4. Click the send box
5. If you know you only need a certain data range you can change the data offset. Generally, don't worry about it.
6. Press the go button.
  • This will generate an excel sheet, which you can open / save and copy and paste the data into your magical experimental excel sheet for use with pivot tables.
  • As a random aside, the new version of excel 2010 has direct database access, which theoretically would allow you to link your pivot tables directly to the database, which would be really cool, and would eliminate this entire process. However, at least as of now, the IU security protocol doesn't allow you to access the database directly, you have to access it through the webserver, so you can't use this. le sigh.

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