Forum post by Mike Simpson
The Heritage League of the 2nd Air Division (HL), a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the historical significance of the 14 B-24 bomb groups that flew out of England during World War II, is planning a large scale project to allow Internet viewers to query our proposed database and view details about an individual's missions flown during the war. Such details would include a list of missions flown by date, target flown against, bomb load, number of aircraft participating, aborts, losses, and flying time.
Information gathered from the National Archives in College Park, MD are used to identify crew load lists and mission details from post mission reports. Losses will be displayed in PDF format by plane. The PDF format was chosen as some of these reports are quite lengthy (40+ pages).
Basic information would come from personnel rosters, mission lists, aircraft inventory, losses, and crew load listings. Our design concept is based initially around 15 tables (a mix of primary and join tables to display information via portals) and our estimate as to the number of records in all tables is approximately 2.2 million.
While we have several researchers who are familiar with FileMaker and have been using it for a number of years to manage membership lists and other small projects, this new endeavor is really pushing the bounds of our capabilities. We are in need of guidance when it comes to trying to host something of this scale on the Internet. We are looking into using a FileMaker hosting service or the possibility of creating our own hosting machine via a virtual machine through our website hosting company. Naturally being a non-profit organization, costs are a prime concern.
Any and all comments would be gratefully appreciated. You can respond via this post or contact me directly at Mike@445BG.org.
Mike Simpson
Executive Vice President
Heritage League of the 2nd Air Division
