[Biodevelopers] 98/384/1536 well microplate database schema?

[Kerr Wall]

On 5/1/03 11:03 AM, "Mike Benway" <mbenway at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Hi.I have a process that generates lot?s of data from 384 well plates. That
> is, three hundred ?eighty four real numbers.The entity is the plate. Some
> plates can even be 1536 well formats. That?s a lot of real numbers for a
> database table.384 columns might even be too many for any available
> database?It strikes me that this must be a very common application, and there
> has got to be a better schema for representing plate data. (as columns of
> arrays, or as blobs or what?)Does anyone have any knowledge of an open-source
> implementation that stores plate data in a database that I could look at?I
> can?t believe that databases would be used just to store links to
> spreadsheets.Thanks
> 

Hi,

I've been working on a LIMS system for the last year and a half.  The
project I work for uses 384 well plates for storage and 96 well plates for
sequencing.  I use mysql as my relational database and have a plate and
clone table to manage this problem.  The plate_id is the primary value for
the plate table and is also a field in the clone table.  For example, if I
were inserting a 384 well-plate then the plate table would get 1 entry and
the clone table would get 384 entries.  If I were inserting a sequence
plate, the plate table would still get 1 entry but the clone table would get
96 entries.  

Hope this helps,

Kerr