Monday, January 12, 2015

Population statistics 2014

Last year, the format of the population statistics on the website of DOPA changed significantly. Until 2012, there were static HTML files with all the data, but now it has been changed to pages using Javascript and retrieving the actual data with JSON requests. I still haven't finished writing the posting on the technical details of this new system and its pros and cons. But apparently one big pro of the new system just showed up now.

In past, these statistics usually came online in April, though the data dated from December 31 of the previous year. Don't know which processes made it take so long, since converting the data into HTML pages shouldn't be much difficult with some programming. To my big surprise, in the new statistics system the data for 2014 already showed up on January 10, or maybe even earlier as I didn't checked it before. Maybe now this new system is directly connected to the database containing the source data.

The total population of Thailand increased from 64,785,909 to 65,124,716, an increase of 338,807 or 0.5%. I still have to adjust the code to calculate the biggest gainer and looser to work with the new population data format, instead I show the graph of the DOPA population data since 1993. Except a big drop in 2004 - apparently due to a big registration data cleanup - there's a steady increase with around 0.5% for several years already.

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