Mark, Good point. Look at the data to understand what to query. The issue is that you are looking at first n rows through futon, but that only works when you have a small number of rows and of similar structure. But in an enterprise situation you'll have hundreds or thousands of doc types and the probability of getting just the ones you want in futon is unlikely at best...
Now if you can get metadata for distinct doc layouts/types with counts (aka pattern frequency analysis of docs) that would help you write the query. Here is an example of a desirable query/report: Doc_type Attributes_in_Doc Count_of_docs_fitting_pattern 1 "name","email" 300020 2 "article","author","date_published" 2050 3 "emp_id","name","ss_number" 50000 This would tell me that I can create a view for analysts to track number of "articles", but I can't provide a drill-through to "email" because type 2 documents don't have email and I can't "join" on a common field because they don't have any common fields. Anyone know how to get this type of metadata and manage it? >> how do I form a query by "Date" if I don't know that the "column" for > date even exists without metadata? > > I personally just pull up one of the records in futon when I can't > remember > the fields. The name of each field is in each doc. So you have the > metadata right there in each doc. >
