design choice: multi-threaded / asynchronous wxpython client?

[Jorge Godoy]

bullockbefriending bard wrote:

> Tempting thought, but one of the problems with this kind of horse
> racing tote data is that a lot of it is for combinations of runners
> rather than single runners. Whilst there might be (say) 14 horses in a
> race, there are 91 quinella price combinations (1-2 through 13-14,
> i.e. the 2-subsets of range(1, 15)) and 364 trio price combinations.
> It is not really practical (I suspect) to have database tables with
> columns for that many combinations?
> 
> I certainly DO have a horror of having my XML / whatever else formats
> getting out of sync. I also have to worry about the tote company later
> changing their XML format. From that viewpoint, there is indeed a lot
> to be said for storing the tote data as numbers in tables.

I don't understand anything about horse races...  But it should be possible
to normalize such information into some tables (not necessarily one).  But
then, there is nothing that prevents you from having dozens of columns on
one table if it is needed (it might not be the most efficient solution
performance and disk space-wise depending on what you have, but it works).

Using things like that you can even enhance your system and provide more
information about each horse, its race history, price history, etc.

I love working with data and statistics, so even though I don't know the
rules and workings of horse racings, I can think of several things I'd like
to track or extract from the information you seem to have :-)

How does that price thing work?  Are these the ratio of payings for bets? 
What is a quinella or a trio?  Two or three horses in a defined order
winning the race?