JUST GET STARTED!

 Hi, I'm Zak and I am on overthinker. There I said it. 

I seemingly love over thinking anything, especially anything I am interested in to death. Read about it, talk about it, think about it... all favorites. There is one piece missing, likely the most important piece, doing the thing. For the last few years I have had a project idea brewing, a database of Tour De France information. I know there are likely hundreds out there already, some quiet good, but I wanted to build my own. 

Why build my own? I have been flirting at the edge of data analysis for quite literally a decade. My last post here was Jan 2016. Since then i have flitted around the edges, dipped my toe into the data pool (lake?), and tinkered a bit. And it never stuck, I have always teetered at the edge and then gotten distracted or pulled in another direction. In a recent conversation with a friend of mine who workes as a Business Intelligence Engineer I brought up how i feel like I learn almost exclusively by doing/building things. (my other hobbies are woodworking and gardening) His response was "What kind of projects do you have going?" I floundered. Then I brought up my on again, mostly off again TDF project idea. As a cyclist and a BIE he instantly took to the idea. Always a good sign. He asked me how far along I was and I said i think about it for about 3 months a year and then ignore it for the other nine, Grand Tour season rolls around and I am all over the stats, teams, riders, stages, the whole deal. After a decently uncomfortable pause he asked me, "What are you waiting on?" My only honest answer? "I'm lazy and lost." At this point he started tossing out ideas and i scribbled them down as quickly as possible. When we get to the right point in the process here, I am sure those notes will get unearthed and shared, right now it is about "JUST GET STARTED." 

My first step in this was to identify a source for TDF data. After some Google searching I landed on ProCyclingStats.com as the most accessible and comprehensive enough for my current needs option. 

Here is a clip of the main page for the 2025 TDF. 

Starting with this I developed a very basic Entity Relationship Diagram. 

Now my next steps will be to develop the schema for the information in the tables. I am going to start with the 3 tables in the ERD and then likely expand out in the number of entities and attributes as needed. Once I am comfortable enough with the schema I will start start working on the database build. At this point it is looking like I will be using PostgreSQL since I can host locally and most of my DB building exposure is on PostgreSQL. I have had the suggestion of both Duckdb and snowflake as useful options. Time will tell. 

This does bring up an important point, one of my goals with the DB and with documenting all of this is to approach the project in different ways as needed. So it is very likely that I will have a few different builds using the same data. By iterating in a multiple environments I can compare more apples to apples the both the process and the outcome.

Thanks for playing along with me. 

-Z 

Links in this post: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqMyAxrscFE
https://www.procyclingstats.com/race/tour-de-france/2025/results/start