German
Shepherd Dog Research Database
The author, shown below exercising four
of his bitches on the slate quarry tips above Llanberis, kept German
Shepherds for over 25 years.
To cut a long story short, in 1992 I bred a litter containing a
'pituitary dwarf' from top German bloodlines. Subsequent research showed
that this had been going on since, at least, 1951. I wanted to set up a
database to research the bloodlines implicated in the possible inheritance of
this condition.
Exhaustive trials of over 20 commercially available animal genealogy
programs showed none to be suitable for this purpose - some were simply not
designed for this purpose but an alarming number also showed inaccurate data
handling patterns and unreliable 'unique' indexing.
I therefore decided to try and code a suitable database from scratch.
This was done using MS-BASIC PDS7.1 and a proprietory 32-bit Btree indexing
system with speed critical routines written mostly in assembly. Initially I
experienced similar indexing problems to many of the programs I had tried to
validate earlier, though I eventually solved the problem of true unique indexing
by completely altering the way index key management is handled. The database
now contains over 360,000 GSD records from 26 countries and the indexing and
referential integrity has remained 100% accurate. Rubbish in - rubbish
out is not an option...
It is believed to be the largest German Shepherd Dog (or any other
breed) datafile in the world in private hands - unless you know better?
Data on dwarfism has been, and continues to be, collected from all
over the world along with data on other known and perceived heritable
conditions. Routines have been written to track conditions such as
haemophilia-A along both the direct and indirect lines X-linking to known
haemophiliacs, facilities exist to calculate inbreeding coefficients for
individuals and for estimates of population genetics parameters along with the
usual pedigree and lineage production routines. The recording of trivia
such as show results has a very low priority.
The bitch on the left is the dam of my dwarf and the
other three bitches are full sisters, all of which were removed from the
breeding programme.
Blood samples from the dam and two surviving sisters have been
sent to the
Incidentally the dogs are collectively known as 'network security'!
©
John R. Walker - 28 December 2005
