---
title: "Why I am not able to find any database tables of survey data in collect schema in PostgreSQL database?"
url: "https://openforis.support/questions/666/why-i-am-not-able-to-find-any-database-tables-of-survey-data-in-collect-schema-in-postgresql-database"
tags: ["openforis", "collect", "windows"]
status: "accepted"
score: 2
answer_count: 2
asked: "2016-08-23T16:57:13"
last_activity: "2016-08-24T09:42:28"
source: "Open Foris Support - Q&A Forum"
license: "Copyright Open Foris, 2026. Some rights reserved under creative commons license."
---

# Why I am not able to find any database tables of survey data in collect schema in PostgreSQL database?

Asked by dhunganamilan on 2016-08-23

Hi Everyone!

I tried to use PostgreSQL instead of SQLite to manage my collect database. I made all the necessary changes to the configuration xml and connected collect to my PostgreSQL server running on localhost. Everything went smooth up to here. My question is Why I am not able to find any database table of survey data in that Schema ("collect" in postgresql )? I got many (around 28) database tables in that schema but I did not find tables of any data I have entered from the published Survey in collect? Doesn't collect start to create database tables as soon as we start entering data from collect desktop? Does anyone have better idea on this?

Pardon me if this is too dumb question to be asked!!

Thanks on advance
Milan


## Accepted answer (score 0, by Stefano (OF) on 2016-08-23)

Link: https://openforis.support/questions/666/why-i-am-not-able-to-find-any-database-tables-of-survey-data-in-collect-schema-in-postgresql-database/667

Hi Milan,  
The table you are looking for is called `ofc_record` (the prefix `ofc` stays for Open Foris Collect...), under the schema `Collect`. Every record (a cluster or a plot, depending on your survey...) corresponds to a row in that table. You can see different interesting columns... key1, key2, key3 contain the values of the key attributes and will help you to find a record. Data1 and data2 contain the actual collected data. They are binary columns and the only way to read the real data is to use Collect. This can be seen as a limit, because the only way to read and modify the data is to use the application, but it makes the process of reading and writing of the records very fast... even if we cannot guarantee that we won't change the way the data is stored into the database soon... This fact of having the data in a sort of "black box" sometimes makes the things more difficult to manage even for us.  
If you need to see and work with the raw data, you can use Collect to export it to CSV or to a relational database.  
I hope that now everything looks a bit clearer.  
For more information about the structure of the database, please have a look to the documentation we have on [GitHub][1].  
Many thanks,  
Open Foris Team


  [1]: https://github.com/openforis/collect/tree/master/doc/db


## Answer (score 0, by dhunganamilan on 2016-08-24)

Link: https://openforis.support/questions/666/why-i-am-not-able-to-find-any-database-tables-of-survey-data-in-collect-schema-in-postgresql-database/668

Hello Stefano,

Thank you for a clear explanation. I hope this 'black box' kind of thing will be changed soon.

Cheers