Yesterday and today have been really tough emotionally but I am here in Cape Town at someone else's expense and the show must go on. Yesterday we worked through all the FINSS modules to get a feel for how they work and whether we would be able to cope with the program on our own. The front end has really been set up as simply as possible so data capture of all the facets of fisheries is straight forward. The trick comes in when you want to get the data out. The programmer, Marco Garcia (who was in attendance) reckons that anyone can figure out SQL so most queries need to be written from scratch. At least these queries can be setup at installation though and never thought about again, unless of course you want something else out. The photo is of Shaheen Moolla explaining the finer details of the database. Today we were given presentations by the participants from Mozambique and Seychelles where the software has already been installed and is in use. They seem quite happy with it. It
