Change the name of the climsoft table currently named final?

[rdstern]

Early in Climsoft days there may have been the idea that the historical data in the current "Final" table was error-free and so the name was appropriate.
The great cartoon here, shows one should probably not use the name Final for anything that may need revision. And our recent work on Climsoft and R-Instat, has shown repeatedly that corrections for oddities and additions (for filling gaps, etc) are needed.

It is a particular problem for a climatic database, because, the data keeps coming - every month there is more to add.

So please could the name change, perhaps to Main? So there is the Initial, maybe Intermediate and then Main?

Of course this is too minor a point to warrant a new version. But discussions resulting from James Musyoka work, with @Patowhiz will (I assume) lead to some improvements in the safeguards and ways of correcting data in Climsoft. This could perhaps be included at the same time?

An example of one point I found concerning was the situation where (say a gap of) a month of rainfall was added to the data. However it was added by importing a sheet (from Excel) that had rainfall and max temperaure and min temperature. Now the temperaures were already in the current (final) table. They were therefore not entered into the Excel sheet, and were therefore missing there.

This apparently changed the previosly entered temperatures into missing values? Now, that's not a big problem in most database systems, because they keep the history of the changes in the data. But I don't think Climsoft currently keeps the history, so the previously entered temperatures are lost forever.

This may not be the case, but - if it is - then I strongly suggest that deleting data in "Final" becomes a task has strong safeguards.