Hello everyone,

I would like to build a simple database to store and organize
documents.
In particular I would need to organize hundreds of .pdf (scientific
publications)
and would like to have a way to search by authors, year, journal, but
it would be great also to be able to "tag" each paper with different
arguments
(in a similar way social netwroks do tag web links)...
How would you modelize the database, remembering that in my
phylosophy, the
simpler the better (also since I will not be able to build something
too complex) ?

Thank you in advance,

Diego

Diego B <messadua (AT) yahoo (DOT) it> wrote:

You need one table where every record is a document. Create a cointainer
field and insert a reference to the document.

Bear in mind that the reference breaks if someone moves or renames the
document. So before you put the reference into your container field,
make sure the document is in a place where it may rest for ever.
BEverybody using your database needs a read-only-access to the folders
with the documents.

Add a bunch of text and date fields to your table in order to tag the
documents. This one table solution is the simplest way. You can work
with that, but will see the shortcomings soon enough.

A proper solution has
- an author table
- a join table linking the authors to the documents
- a tag table
- a join table linking the tags to the documents

--
http://clk.ch

On Feb 13, 3:10*am, c... (AT) tele2 (DOT) ch (Christoph Kaufmann) wrote:
Wow : )

Thank you so much for the clear discussion on the topic,
now and once more I understand why the simpler is not always the
better...
I will try to follow your suggestions, and get back here in case of
issues,

Diego