On 20 Aug 2008 at 11:40, Kim Patrick Clow wrote: > Someone suggested creation of a "Wiki" page, I didn't know wiki was a > server application. So for what I am trying to do, should it be wiki? > I have > MS Access, but again, I don't want to become an expert in database > theory, I just want to get started.
Is your data structured? Will people want to search it in a structured fashion? If it's free-form data, a Wiki works just fine. If a full-text search is satisfactory, a Wiki will work fine. If, however, your data needs to have a stricter structure enforced and will need to be searched in a more rigorous fashion, then you need a database of some form. Of course, a Wiki will store your data in a database, one record per Wiki page. But it will be a big blob of text with no structure enforced in the data entry process. Consider that once you start with a Wiki, you're basically going to be stuck with it, as parsing the blob of text out into a database is going to be pretty impossible without a lot of manual intervention. On the other hand, a database can easily output to a concatenated blob of text that can be loaded into a Wiki. I'm a huge fan of Wikis, though, and I'm not at all sure what the best answer is. If your goal is to make the information available to others and to allow selected people to collaborate with you, the easiest way to get started with that is a Wiki. Using a database would mean building a web front end to it and that's a lot of work, even when you have the chops to do it. But the database allows much better data retrieval and output, and, in the long run, if you anticipate getting your catalog published, you really ought to go with a database. [I was the database tech for the New New Grove works list for Franz Liszt, so I have substantial experience with how to implement this kind of thing] -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
