Drinks Places Online

CGA Strategy had developed an extensive database of information about UK pubs, clubs, restaurants and other licensed premises in the UK. This database was stored on its own systems and it wanted to be able to offer it as an online password-protected service which customers could access through an easy to use interface. We developed an SQL version of the database and devleoped a front end which allowed the customer to see all the available detail about an outlet on a single screen, which included address and contact details, website address, profiling information such as outlet type and operator name.

CGA had also been compiling a photo library of pubs and restuarants and we were able to incorporate those photos into the view of the record presented via the web, along with other features such as map links based on postcode.

The key to this system was the ease-of-use of the front end. With around 150,000 licensed outlets in the UK, the customer needed a way of very easily selecting the subset of records they were interested in. The system we developed was entirely menu driven so the user doesn't need to know any query language at all. They can choose any combination of location (such as place name, post code, or local licensing authority), operator name, outlet type (such as pubs, clubs, hotels, etc) or tenure. Later enhancements were to allow outlets to be selected by annual barrelage or by products sold.

Having filtered out the records they wanted, the customer was then able to look at summary reports or individual records, export them to CSV files for use in their own applications or perform their own specialised marketing analysis, or see various statistical breakdowns of the data they had selected, including breakdown by operator, postcode, TV region, local authority name, outlet type, or trading style.

A later addition was to show brand distribution of the various drinks products stocked by the outlets within the customer's subset.

All of the queries had to run at high-speed and extensive use was made of cacheing and indexing to obtain superior performance. In addition, it all had to be securely held with a complete user password management system. As a result of this project, we also developed tools to perform cross-checks on the data which helped identify duplicates and postcoding errors.