> Basically, unless you are going to be cataloging thousands if pieces,
or are interested in strange queries of your data, you don't need a
relational database
This is what many people believe. I make a large
portion of my income fixing the results of that
belief.
i would v-e-r-y s-t-r-o-n-g-l-y second these
comments. i had to clean up a DB a few years ago
for the canadian electroacoustic community (who i
also work for) that had a flat structure (i think
the earliest versions of FM didn't allow for
relations to be built across files [now this is
done with tables within the same file]), and so
14 years of poor DB understanding and use
combined with no attempts to correct the
situation as the DB grew cost the organization a
not insignificant amount of money to fix.
an important point, perhaps, is that while some
corporation can afford to hire people to fix
problem X or Y, smaller arts orgs do not
typically have access to the kinds of budgets
required for DB management. and a
poorly-designed or insufficient DB will not only
cost you $ years later to fix, everyone who tries
to work with it will spend 5-10% (or more!!!)
time doing data entry -- or searches -- than
should be needed.
the main problem with flat structures
(non-relational) is that repeated data eventually
ends up with variants: person names are spelt
wrong in one of the numerous records, so
searching for the composer omits the
wrongly-spelled data; in our case, biographical
notes appeared on every record with the contact's
name, and so there were several bios for the same
composer in some cases, meaning i had to spend
time just trying to figure out which one was in
fact right and most up to date. with a
relational structure, unique information
(composer bio, birthdate, contact info) appears
only once and any updates are immediately visible
in all records related to that type of
information.
ah, also helpful is to have auto-entry fields date_created and date_modified.
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