[GRASSLIST:4189] GRASS and SQL?

[Alex Thorn]

Hi again.

Still hacking away at dynamically modeling waterfowl
movements. Also still using a shell script to make my
C model talk to GRASS via ASCII files. The issue that 
I am currently addressing is how to avoid having the 
birds (which are currently implemented as sites but 
sometimes converted to raster data for analysis
purposes, particularly for use of the r.distance 
command) occupy the same cell/location at the same 
time.  Information about the relative locations of the

birds would be useful for this, and r.distance seems
the correct command for extracting this information.  
What I want is a good way of organizing it.

>From what I've read it seems that GRASS does not 
provide extensive tools for organizing non-spatial
data, but if such tools do exist, I'd be interested in
learning more.  Failing that, I'm looking for advice
about whether it would be useful to organize data into
a formal database structure (using SQL, I suppose)
outside of GRASS, or whether I'm better off continuing
to rely on somewhat crude manipulation of text files.
I have never used SQL before, and so don't know much
about its capabilities of interfacing with other 
programs (e.g. my C model).  Does SQL sound like a 
reasonable method for handling data?  I don't want to
give myself unnecessary headaches.  I also would 
rather not reinvent the wheel.  It seems obvious that 
the issues I am dealing with are ones that other 
people must have dealt with before...

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Alex

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