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The very first thing you need to do is go to the PDM and select the Store Native Races Only option and then select the Prevent Re-Store option. The reason for using these options will become clear later.

Create a new Profiler Database to work with. Select the “New Profiler Database…” command from the PDM. In the standard file dialog:

	Use the “Save In” area to select which folder you’d like to create the database in. The database is just a file, like any other file, but its important to keep things organized well so that you can find them at a later date. When you install EquiSim it creates a folder called “databases” in the program’s folder (c:\program files\thorotech\esroi4\databases) – this is a good place to store your databases, but you are free to store them wherever you wish.
	Use the “File Name” area of the File Dialog to enter a name for your databaIn se. Call it whatever you wish, as long as it contains legal filename characters.
	Note the location (folder) where you are creating the database and the file name! And then click Save.

As soon as you click the “Save” button the program will create a Profiler Database in the folder you selected with the name you specified. At this point another dialog titled “Profiler Database Setup” appears. This dialog allows you to configure the way that the database you just created works. If you leave the “connect to this database at Start Up” option checked then EquiSim will automatically connect to this database whenever you start the program. Hint – you can tell what database EquiSim is connected to by looking at the status bar on the bottom of the EquiSim main window. There you will see a pane labeled “DB: <name of connected database>”.

You can customize the configuration of the database you created by clicking on the “Connection Preferences” button in this dialog. BUT – we’re not going to do that here. I’ll show you another way to get to the configuration area in a second. First I’d like you to learn how to connect to different databases using the PDM. So, click the “OK” button on the dialog you are viewing and then go to the PDM and select “Disconnect Profiler Database”. You are no longer connected to a database (see the Status Bar). If you did NOT select to ‘connect to this database at startup”, then this is the state the program will be in whenever you first start it up. In order to connect to a database, then, you go to the PDM and use the “Connect to Profiler Database” command. Now use the File Dialog that appears to go to the folder where you stored your database (use the “Look In” area), find the database file with the name you came up with, select the file with the mouse, and click the “Open” button. You are now connected to that database (again, see the Status Bar for verification).

Lets now go back to this issue of configuring a Profiler Database. First – a little background information - what is there to configure in a Profiler Database?

Well, a Profiler database contains information about the relative abilities of each horse. It is important to note the word “relative” here. Profiler databases do not contain such things as speed figures, pace figures, beaten lengths, and such. They contain information about the analysis EquiSim does on each horse. Who had the best speed figure based on the way EquiSim (and you) saw the race? That sort of thing. In general I refer to these things as factors or “abilities”. They include things such as Best E1, Best Speed Figure, Best Late Pace figure, etc.. In addition to storing this information about each horse, EquiSim ROI 4.0 now cross references these factors with the connections of each horse (trainers, jockeys, owners) and tracks the values via the Profiler. Collectively, this information is referred to as Connection Stats. EquiSim takes this sort of information – these “factors” and “abilities” – and boils them down to a few numbers. These numbers we’ll refer to as the Profiler Values – there are a number of them: the Profiler Value based on a combination of all the horse’s abilities, the Trainer Value, the Jockey Value, the Owner Value, the Sire Value, and the Comp Value that is a combination of all the values together. This information is also stored in the Profiler database.

With that background we can move to talking about configuring the Profiler Database. There are two reasons to configure the database:

A) To control the size of a database, and, in doing so, the time it takes to perform analysis on a database, you may wish to avoid storing certain types of information that you do not care about.

B) The Profiler Values mentioned above are directly related to the types of factors and connection stats stored in a Profiler Database. So - configuring the database lets you pick and choose what factors go into the making of these values. Since the Selections Performance Analysis Tool (SPAT) lets you see how well each Profiler Value is performing in myriad different situations, this is the perfect way to create your own “system” to find contenders with. The configuration tool lets you develop the basis of the “system”, the SPAT lets you analyze its performance. The fact that there are so very, very many combinations of things to make up the Profiler Values means that your “system” will likely be different than anyone else’s.

Here’s how to perform the configuration:

· Get to the Profiler Preferences property sheet. You can do this in a number of ways. Here’s one: go to the PDM and select “Profiler Preferences”

· In the PPR select the “Setup” tab. Here you can switch between the connection types (Horse, Jockey, Trainer, Owner, Sire). With each connection type you can establish whether or not you want to STORE data values for each “ability” AND whether you want to “Use” the ability in the program. If you do NOT choose to use an ability then:

i. The ability will not appear in any of the views, such as the Profiler View

ii. The ability will not be used in the computation of the various profiler values it relates to.

· There are “standard” abilities (std.) and Connection (cxn) abilities. Standard abilities are the ones that are most typically associated with things relating to the performance of a horse in a race (but not always). Cxn abilities are those that are more about the circumstances of a race.

· Note that the Horse Std. Abilities are “always” stored.

· Now click on the More Config tab. The fields on this tab let you further set up the database in the following ways;

i. You can specify the criteria for certain Connection abilities. For example, hat should “low odds” be considered?

ii. You can specify which types of races are allowed into the database you are connected to.

iii. You can tell EquiSim whether or not to STORE profiler values in this database. If you do this, then it will take longer to store races because they must all be profiled before storing. If you do NOT do this, then you can store data faster, BUT, the SPAT will not be able to tell you how well the Profiler Values perform statistically.

iv. You can specify that only NATIVE races should be stored. See – some cards (the ohio 7/7) contain races for more than one track. If you have both race cards, and you store both, you could end up storing the same data twice – and this can lead to problems. NOTE – you can use the “Prevent Restore” option in the PDM to accomplish this very same thing. Personally, I leave both options on.

v. You can tell the program what the minimum races required are to store a race’s profiler values. Imagine the first time you get a set of profiler values – which horse has the best value? The answer is – all of them. And this does not make for very good stats. Profiler values come from statistics derived from data in a database. When you first start out the database is empty and, thus, all the profiler values are Zero – and everyone is tied for first place. This problem continues until there are at least a good handful of races in any particular profile. The ability to set the minimum number of races simply lets you avoid irrelevant data that will appear when not many races match a profile.

vi. You can tell EquiSim how many races to STOP at (most recent first) when generating a profile using the Store By Tracks command. This is important if you are working with a very large database as the more races in a profile, the longer it takes to profile. It can also be useful if you are only interested in getting CURRENT races in a profile (again, the races chosen are from the most recent first).

The above presents the creation and configuration of Profiler Database. Once you grasp the concepts you can move on to the Updating Databases tutorial to learn how to get data into your database.

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